Benefits of Specialization
Benefits of Specialization
Benefits of Specialization
•Work teams –An alternative to job specialization that allows an entire group to design the work system it will use to perform an interrelated set o
•Departmental The process of grouping jobs according to some logical arrangement
ization
Functional Grouping jobs involving the same or similar activities
Departmentali •Advantages
zation –Each department can be staffed by experts in that functional area.
–Supervision is facilitated because an individual manager needs to be familiar only with a relatively narrow set of skills.
–Coordinating activities inside each department is easier.
Disadvantages
Decision making tends to become slower and more bureaucratic.
Employees may begin to concentrate too narrowly on their own function and lose sight of the total organizational system.
Accountability and performance become increasingly difficult to monitor.
Grouping jobs involving the same or similar activities
•Advantages
–Each department can be staffed by experts in that functional area.
–Supervision is facilitated because an individual manager needs to be familiar only with a relatively narrow set of skills.
–Coordinating activities inside each department is easier.
•Decentralizat –Decentralization
ion and •The process of systematically delegating power and authority throughout the organization to middle- and lower-level managers
Centralization –Centralization
•The process of systematically retaining power and authority in the hands of higher-level managers
–Factors that determine an organization’s position on the decentralization–centralization continuum:
•The organization’s external environment
–In general, the greater the complexity and uncertainty of the environment, the greater is the tendency to decentralize.
•The history of the organization
•The nature of the decisions
–The costlier and riskier the decisions, the more pressure there is to centralize.
Coordinating Coordination
Activities The process of linking the activities of the various departments of the organization
•The Need for Coordination
–The primary reason for coordination is that departments and work groups are interdependent—they depend on one another for in
•The greater the independence between departments, the more coordination the organization requires if departments are to be ab
There are three major forms of interdependence:
1)Pooled interdependence
–When units operate with little interaction; their output is pooled at the organizational level
2)Sequential interdependence
–When the output of one unit becomes the input for another in a sequential fashion
3)Reciprocal interdependence
–When activities flow both ways between units
Structural Structural Coordination Techniques: Management Hierarchy,Rules and Procedures,Managerial Liaison Roles,Task Forces,Integratin
Coordination
Techniques
The •Bureaucracy
Bureaucratic –A model of organization design based on a legitimate and formal system of authority
Model of According to Weber, the ideal bureaucracy exhibits five basic characteristics:
Organization A distinct division of labor with each position filled by an expert
Design A consistent set of rules to ensure uniformity in task performance
A hierarchy of positions or offices that creates a chain of command from the top of the organization to the bottom
Impersonal management with appropriate social distance between managers and subordinates
Employment and advancement based on technical expertise, and employees protected from arbitrary dismissal
•Advantages
–Improves efficiency
–Helps minimize favoritism or bias
–Makes procedures and practices very clear to everyone
•Disadvantages
–Results in inflexibility and rigidity
–Making exceptions to or changing rules is difficult
–Results in the neglect of human and social processes within the organization
•Technology
"Three basic forms of technology were identified by Woodward:
Unit or small-batch technology
The product is custom-made to customer specifications or produced in small quantities.
Example: a printing shop that produces business cards
Large-batch or mass-production technology
The product is manufactured in assembly-line fashion by combining component parts into another part of finished product.
Example: an automobile manufacturer
Continuous-process technology
Raw materials are transformed to a finished product by a series of machine or process transformations.
Example: a chemical refinery
"
"Woodward found:
Unit or small-batch technology and continuous-process firms tend to have very little bureaucracy, whereas large-batch or mass-prod
Organizational success was related to the extent to which organizations followed the typical pattern appropriate to their technology
"
6-4 Basic Most organization designs fall into one of four basic categories:
Forms of Functional (U-form) design
Organization Conglomerate (H-form) design
Design Divisional (M-form) design
Matrix design
Others are hybrids based on two or more of the basic forms.
The basic advantages are that it allows the organization to staff all important positions with functional experts, and it facilitates coor
On the other hand, it promotes a functional, rather than an organizational, focus and tends to promote centralization.
Functionally based designs are most commonly used in small organizations.
Hybrid Some organizations use a design that represents a hybrid of two or more of the common forms of organizational design.
Designs Few companies use a design in its pure form; most firms have one basic organization design as a foundation for managing the busine
Some organizations use a design that represents a hybrid of two or more of the common forms of organizational design.
Few companies use a design in its pure form; most firms have one basic organization design as a foundation for managing the busine