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I. What Is Organizational Structure?
Organizational structure is the manner in which an organization divides its labour into specific tasks and achieves coordination among these tasks. It broadly refers to how the organization’s individuals and groups are put together or organized to accomplish work. Organizational structure intervenes between goals and accomplishments and thus influences organizational effectiveness. Structure affects how effectively and efficiently group effort is coordinated. To achieve its goals, an organization has to divide labour among its members and then coordinate what has been divided.
II. The Division and Coordination of Labour
Labour has to be divided because individuals have physical and intellectual limitations. There are two basic dimensions to the division of labour, a vertical dimension and a horizontal dimension. Once labour is divided, it must be coordinated to achieve organizational effectiveness.
A. Vertical Division of Labour
The vertical division of labour is concerned primarily with apportioning authority for planning and decision making. A couple of key themes or issues underlie the vertical division of labour.
Autonomy and Control. The domain of decision making and authority is reduced as the number of levels in the hierarchy increases. A flatter hierarchy pushes authority lower and involves people further down the hierarchy in more decisions.
Communication. As labour is progressively divided vertically, timely communication and coordination can become harder to achieve. As the number of levels in the hierarchy increases, filtering is more likely to occur.
B. Horizontal Division of Labour
The horizontal divisio ...