Organizational Structure Designs

This is a brief about how a manager can design his organization

Work Specialization 
or division of labor, to describe the degree to which activities in the organization are subdivided into separate jobs or broken into steps, with each step being completed by a separate individual.
Advantage:
a- Employee skills increase through task repetition
b- Less time is spent in changing tasks
c- It’s easier and less costly to find and train workers to do specific and repetitive tasks
Disadvantage:
a- At the human diseconomies, it surfaced as boredom, fatigue, stress, low productivity, poor quality, increased absenteeism and high turnover.

Departmentalization 
It is the basis by which jobs are grouped together, there are ways to group as following:
– Functions
a- The advantage is obtaining efficiencies from putting like specialists together.
b- It seeks to achieve economies of scale by placing people with common skills and orientations into common units.
– Product (service)
a- The advantage is increased accountability for product performance since all activities related to a specific product (service) are under the direction of a single manager
– Geography (Territory)
It can be used if an organization’s customers are scattered over a large geographic area
– Process
It can be used for processing customers as well as products
– Customer
It is when companies is organized around customers, such as consumer, small business and corporate. Customers in each department have a common set of problems and needs

Chain of Control 
It is the unbroken line of authority that extends from top to the lowest and clarifies who reports to whom. There are two concepts
– Authority
It refers to the rights inherent in a managerial position
– Unity of commands
It helps keeping the concept of an unbroken line of authority, it states that a person should have only one superior to whom this person is directly responsible

Span of Control 
How many employee can a manager efficiently and effectively direct (manage)?
Wide or large
The wider or larger the span, the more efficient the organization in terms of cost however at some points, wider span reduces effectiveness. When the span is too large (wide) employee performance suffers because supervisors no longer have time to provide necessary leadership and support.
Narrow and small
Advantage:
A manager can maintain close control.
Disadvantages:
– They’re expensive because it adds more level of management
a. Vertical communication become more complex, added levels slow down the decision making and tend to isolate upper management
b. Encourage overly tight supervision discourage employee autonomy.

Centralization and Decentralization 
– Centralization
The degree to which decision making is concentrated at a single point in the organization, typically the top management makes the decisions
– Decentralization
The more lower-level personnel provide input or are actually given the discretion to make decisions

Formalization 
It refers to the degree to which jobs within organization are standardized. If the job is highly formalized, then the job has minimum amount of discretion over what is to be done, when is to be done and how is to be done.

_______________________________________________________

About: Khaled Samy Hall

Khaled is the Co-founder and CEO at HYNO World company, and Head of Projects Management at Middle East Telecommunications Company (METCO). Khaled has a long history of successful career growth in a variety of industries. He is currently the Book Author of "The ROI analysis: Project Management Office Development" and active Blogger.