Matrix-Restructuring: How To Do It Right | CDAdvisory

Restructuring an organization away from hierarchy by adopting a matrix design, in most cases, make ingrained issues that the overall organization faces resurface, and that restructuring most often translates into one single cause:?levels of authority and decision-making power. Depending on an organization's dynamics?versus productivity, authority levels in decision-making can either heighten efficiency and effectiveness or hinder them altogether.?

The Power Struggle

Several are the reasons companies worldwide opt for a matrix design, even in extremely top-down decision-making business environments like China – which is the case of tech?giant Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. -, organizations?go ahead and bet on a matrix structure that they hope will alleviate the levels and barriers towards success in their both short and long-term goals. Among improved employee engagement, better resource allocation, improved collaboration, and others; one motive seems to always stand out to some degree when pushing for matrix restructuring: enhanced and distributed decision-making power.?

Ripping Down The Structure

Organizations may come to the conclusion that even authority for making decisions should be dispersed in order to facilitate lower levels of management to make faster decisions in response to a fast-changing nowadays market environment – and even if greater flexibility in decision-making allows employees to be more agile when assigned to different projects, or teams, as needed; “matrix structures invariably violate two deeply ingrained classical principles of organization: 1) Authority should equal responsibility and 2) Every subordinate should be assigned to a single?boss” says Jeffrey Barker in?Conflict Approaches of Effective and Ineffective Project Managers: A Field Study in a Matrix Organization. And with that in mind, clashes in restructuring towards a matrix design are, unsurprisingly, inevitable.?

Conflicts in Matrix-Restructuring

The first conflict that can arise from a matrix structure is the one about multiple reporting relationships, in which employees find it paradoxically hard to execute their work efficiently when they are supposed to report to a wider range of managers at once.?

Another clash would be related to conflicting and confusing expectations, in which employees suddenly start interacting more often as agents of departments to which they did not belong before, where they face working with people with different work orientations and values.?

Another issue is that managers should?be aware of the overload of demands, in which employees are?bombarded?with orders from various sides and end up either not respecting the deadlines or losing the context of their tasks.?

In addition, the most common clash is the one about authority between departments that intersect in the matrix structure, as?authority?is an aspect that is often explicitly exercised, the sharing of it can bring up disagreements in the most varied ways, from priorities over projects and personnel resources all the way to estimates of budget for implementation of plans. Plus, depending on how wide the organization geographically spans, those organizational cultural clashes significantly increase, such as in the case of offices in China?versus?offices in Denmark, of the same organization. In a highly top-down Chinese business environment, the organization as a whole may find it extremely hard to adapt to seeing power and authority being extended horizontally, instead of vertically as they are most often used to. The same to Denmark, which occupies the other extreme point of the?Attitudes Towards Authority?scale (by Erin Meyer) by being extremely egalitarian – which means?that an organization’s employees in a Copenhagen office run the risk of spending much longer?than expected to make mutual decisions due to the excess of democracy halting speed in decision-making.?

That’s it

Having carefully not only designed the hierarchy-to-matrix restructuring strategy, but reflected upon all those possible cultural clashes, intuitively and holistically based on the characteristics of all?offices an organization has installed around the world, in order to increase the chances of?success as much as possible, it should go ahead and invite as many people from the top layer of management to not only accept the restructuring plan but to become?agents of change?themselves, so that from that point on establish a strong company-wide network to help influence employees to provoke the expected change,?ironically, bottom-up.?