Organizational Structure Innovation A Study by Artur Victoria
By Artur Victoria
Submitted 2012-02-17 07:01:21
Number Of Times Read: 60
Organizational planning will, in our opinion, always remain a major management function. The need for effectively functioning organizations is too important to leave planning to organization specialists alone. This statement is in no sense a forecast of a decline in the number of organization departments in the corporations. On the contrary, the growth in the numbers of organization specialists is expected to be rather impressive in the next five years. This is because operating managers, who will continue to be primarily concerned with and responsible for implementing organization plans, will rely more and more on the staff specialist for advice, guidance, and innovation.
Organization planning functions tend to come about when organizations are faced with massive growth or change or increased complexity. And all indications point toward an increasingly complex environment, both in the business community and in society at large; and, thus, organizations will need an increasingly complex set of rules to carry out their missions.
The increase in governmental regulations and in special interest groups and the changing aspirations and expectations of employees suggest a future need for different ways of accomplishing organizational objectives. In the years ahead, the tried and true maxims about organizations will change. Many, organizations have already developed group chief executive offices. Often, one man can no longer oversee the operation of very complex structures. The nature of the marketplace and the development of knowledgeable workers have changed the definition of functional positions. The sales manager of today has a much different job than the sales manager of 10 years ago. Thus, the need for well trained specialists who can use a process approach to organization planning continues to grow.
The organization specialist will perform several functions within the organization, but service to the operating manager will be paramount. Services provided in all areas of the planning process (structural analysis, power analysis, job definition, and staffing) will fall into at least three areas: advice, innovation, and research.
The operating manager must implement changes. The role of the specialist will be to suggest needed changes based on analysis, aid in the development of implementation procedures, and evaluate the effectiveness of procedures. One study points out that the successful organization executive does not deal in ivory tower visions of organizational life but gives realistic advice useful to the practicing manager.
The organization planning group is often the one group within the company that concerns itself with finding new ways to manage people, identify potential leaders, and divide work to meet the needs of the company. The effectiveness of the group will depend in large part on its continued ability to innovate.
Much of the work of the organization planning group will be research oriented. Analysis of behavior, power relationships, and production systems will be the key to the group charter.
Few operating managers today want to make major organizational decisions based on hunches or ideas that may have worked in the past or in other situations. Research in organization, culture, market strategies, production techniques, and management processes will be one of the cornerstones that will insure continued effectiveness.
The effective organization planning group will be able to measure its contribution to the organization in several ways. Its contribution will be evident in increases in operational effectiveness, the end of the problem that brought organizational planning into existence, lower production and administrative expenses, better relationships between operating departments, the selection of better people for key posit ions, and the creation of a ready reserve of employees for jobs that had not been designed when the group was initiated.
Organizational planning can easily result in little or no improvement in performance if not implemented effectively. Successful implementation involves several elements: communication, management information systems, policies and procedures, timing, and compensation.
There is more to the communication of organizational changes than the distribution of corporate announcements to the newspapers. The manner in which they are made known to the members of the organization is crucial to success. Whenever changes occur, chain reactions are set up that affect large groups of people. Relationships change; objectives change; status changes; power is redistributed. People affected must have a thorough understanding not only of changes but the reasons for them.
Time and again, organizational changes developed for valid reasons achieve nothing. For example, suppose a sales organization is redesigned to make it more responsive to the marketplace; but sales fail to go up, or even go down. Why? Perhaps sales representatives in the field were not notified of changes because top management felt that only the managers were involved. The reps may still be waiting for the other shoe to fall.
The way that information is processed within an organization changes when the organization changes. Yet, provision for different reporting relationships is often made after changes are already implemented. As the objectives of jobs change and the individual objectives of managers change, the way in which financial data are reported internally also changes. For instance consider the company that traditionally measured its progress by volume of sales. When the company was reorganized and new objectives initiated, a key measure of progress and, in fact, the way that employees would be compensated was gross profit on sales. It was soon determined that the reporting systems in use for several years would not accommodate new report needs. A new system was developed but could not be implemented until several months had passed.
When changes are made in the structure, job design, power allocations, and staffing of an organization, they should be documented. Many organizations make the mistake of leaving the development of policies and procedures that back up organization changes until there is less disruption within the affected groups. But, in fact, the faster that policies and procedures can be distributed, read, and understood, the better.
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Submitted 2012-02-17 07:01:21
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