Organisational structure (week 3)

It has come to my week 3 of my University life. This week, Business and Management has taught a lot of new and important terms. And it comes to the new section about organizational structure which includes four main component. They are the division of work, centralization and decentralization, matrix structure and also span of control and chain of command. They are all important to an organization and different organization would have different types of structure. There would be different changes for them when they face internal and external environment. In the following, I would like to tell you some of the special elements which an organization needs.

 

Through doing the Business report, I know more about those elements. For example, I am doing HSBC. Their division of work depends on products and services and customers. But of course they need more customers. They products and services are mostly for customers. HSBC is a large organization which the practice of dividing a job, task, assignment, or contract into smaller tasks do exist. Subtasks are often distributed to functional areas such as operations, finance, production, or marketing. They may also be assigned to individuals.

 

Apart from division of work, we also got centralization. From the lecture, I know that most of the big company are centralization. This is because big company has trick and tight policy. They need easier management. This would also reduce the overhead costs. For mini company, they would like to satisfy local needs. They would like to enlarge their market share. Through their decisions, they would know what customers’ needs are. In reality, Google is a special organization. They are having decentralization. Because their staff have their choice to do what they want to do, they can have their rest area.

 

I found that span of control and chain of command are the most interesting part. Because every organization would need to face this. It kind of tricky, the larger the organization, the more people and staff. They need to choose they want a wider span of control or chain of command. However, this would lead to different structure and problem for an organization. A bank would have a tall structure but their decision will make slower. Take HSBC as an example, HSBC in no doubt is in tall structure. It gets long chain and also with wide spans of control. They have different kinds of functions for each layer, like managers and employee, they got their use in the bank. One is providing new resources and products to public and customers. Managers supervise subordinates. For a bank, it has a very tight control. They seldom have big contradiction for their decisions between managers and subordinates.

 

It’s quite an interesting and amazing topic for this week. It makes me know that, the different organization would lead to have different structure. But the utmost I remember is structure and performance are directly proportional. And I believe that’s true, a strong structure would lead to successful easier.