Designing Organization

There are some important things in designing organization. The important things are work specialization, departmentalization, chain of command, span of control, centralization-decentralization, and formalization. The first one, Work specialization, it divides the work job into some parts. This specialization makes the employee job more efficient. Departmentalization is when the job is divided into some department. It is grouped together using combination (usually large company). The chain of command, there are some important things too such as authority, responsibility, and unity of command. All of them is important to maintain control in organization. But they are now less relevant in today’s organizations. Span of controls, In the old days, Managers supervise no more than 5 or 6. Now it is depends on the manager skills. centralization-decentralization is a structural decision about who makes the decisions. The last one is Formalization. The organization use standards to maintain controls. But now, the standards is less strict.

The structure of an organization should support their strategy. Both of them influence each other. If the strategy changes, the structure also change. The size of the organization affects its structure. When the employee is more than 2000, it is fairly mechanistic.

The traditional design structure is more simple. It means, less departmentalization, wide spans of control, authority centralized in a single person, and little formalization.

Organizing for flexibility in the twenty-first century. The structure of a team is made up of work teams. The matrix structure assigns the specialists from different functional departments to work on one or more project led by the project managers. The boundaryless organization. It is not limited by the boundaries imposed by a predefined structure. A virtual organization consist of a small core of full-time employee and outside specialists temporary hired as needed to work on projects.

Telecommuting is very often we see today. It makes the employee work at home. The employee work is linked to the workplace. This makes the employee work longer in a day but fewer in a week. In telecommuting, there is flextime which is a scheduling system which makes the employee work to fulfill some required time we give to them.

In twentieth century, there is contingent workers that is basically a worker that we hire not all the time, so like temporary. We give them a deadline for them to finished all the work. The hiring process has a qualification such as screening. We hire these contingent workers based on our demands.