Unit 1 business and the business environment l/508/0485 table of contents
The interrelationship of the various functions within an organisation and how they link to organisational structure
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| The interrelationship of the various functions within an organisation and how they link to organisational structure
The organisations I work for is a small organisation and they make use of the flat structure among functions in the organisation. Every function works together and is placed on a level playing ground with one another whenever there is need to participate in daily activities, and attend to business decisions. This has help to bring about a limit in the levels of management so all staff are only a few steps away from leadership. The merit obtained from this is that it has made our employees to be more productive since it creates an environment where there are less hierarchy-related pressures. Nevertheless, one of the problems we encounter about this structure is that there was a time when teams or different functions disagreed on something, a new way of production. It was hard for us to get aligned and back on track until an executive decision from our leader or manager was made. We have the functional structure which departmentalizes an organisation based on common job functions. An organisation with this structure, for instance, would group all of the marketers together in one department, group all of the salespeople together in a separate department, and group all of the customer service people together in a third department. The functional structure allows for a high degree of specialisation for employees, and is easily scalable should the organization grow. Also this structure is mechanistic in nature -- which has the potential to inhibit an employee's growth -- putting staff in skill-based departments can still allow them to delve deep into their field and find out what they're good at. which can be used by organisations have it that their different functions are done from different departments and staffs of such department report to their department managers who then report to other top level managers especially those at the C-level such as the accounts manager would report to the chief financial officer. …company name..make use of the functional structure and there is clear line of authority from the C-level managers to department managers to supervisors and down to the employees. Each department is run and managed by the department manager who makes key decision after orders come from the chief executives and the business owner and work hand in hand with senior staffs and supervisors to ensure strategies are well implemented. Through this, employees with administrative roles will be able to identify and concentrate on their job role and report to superiors or supervisors who then report to the department manager or the employee report to the manager directly. One disadvantage of this structure as observed at ….company name..include that there may sometimes be lack of adequate communications between departments and this can bring about lack of consistency in productivity and work efficiency. A good example was when lack of instant communication between the administrative department and the accounts department bring about the delay in the processing of the invoice of one of service providers of the organisation with respect to a service provided to the administrative department. Organisations making use of the matrix structure have more flexibility in the activities of their business functions because each employee works in each department or unit that strictly have a key notable function in the organisation. But the employees can be assigned tasks or projects by different managers of different department/unit while they also work as a team with other employees of other departments to implement tasks and projects. The matrix structure therefore help businesses to adapt each function to the changing needs of the organisation. A good example can be see when employees from the accounting department of an organisation had to work as a team with employees from the customer service and administrative department to get complaints of a key customer of the organisation solved based on the requirement for the input of each department on achieving a solution. Download 41.21 Kb. Share with your friends:
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