He wanted to eliminate vertical and horizontal boundaries within GE and break down barriers between the company and its customers and suppliers. Boundaryless Organizational StructureĪmerican business executive and former CEO of General Electric, Jack Welch, coined the term “boundaryless organization” when he described his ideal General Electric. The bureaucratic organizational structure seeks control in multiple levels and, if there is a downfall to the virtual organizational structure, it is that there is far less control over the different parts of the business. The virtual organization is definitely on the other side of the spectrum from bureaucratic organizational structure. The flexibility a virtual organization provides is hard for organizations to resist, as it allows them to contract out any function they feel another organization can do more cheaply than them. General Motors, Nike, and Cisco are just a few of them. Thousands of well-known organizations are virtual in one way or another. Large organizations dabbling in the virtual organizational structure usually do so to outsource manufacturing. Newman’s Own employs only 18 people, and outsources almost everything-manufacturing, procurement, shipping and the like. Paul Newman’s food product company, Newman’s Own, runs on a virtual organizational structure. The chart in Figure 2 illustrates a typical virtual organization, which includes employees that practice flex-time in a home office, ones that are in satellite offices domestically and internationally, and then a group of independent contractors, telecommuters and vendors. Paramount may be acting as the central “organization.” The businesses to which Paramount sends work would make up the balance of the virtual organization. During the credits, you see animation companies and sound editing companies. Each one of those companies has played a role in making the film. It might begin with “Paramount.” And then you see “Bad Robot.” And maybe two other companies. Now, when you sit down to watch a movie, you see several different production companies’ logos on the screen before the movie even starts. Think of it as “renting” departments rather than owning them.īack in the early days of Hollywood, movies were made by big studios with large bureaucratic organizational structures and a laundry list of celebrities. Virtual OrganizationĪ virtual organization is a small, core organization that outsources major business functions. Moving from a bureaucratic to a team structure requires a great deal of change, so larger organizations will assemble teams and add a quasi-team structure into their bureaucratic org chart. More often than not, when larger organizations decide to use teams, they do so as a part of a bureaucratic structure rather than a straight team structure. Based on the shape of the organizational chart in Figure 1, you can understand why Whole Foods refers to its mission statement as the “Declaration of Interdependence.” Indeed, each of the teams is dependent on and answers to the other members of their own team and the other teams.įigure 1. Whole Foods Market boasts a team-based organizational structure, with the teams shaped around their departments within the store-there was a produce team, a meat team, and so on. Team structures usually require employees to be generalists as well as specialists.Ī team structure can define a whole company. In an organizational structure based on teams, the structure breaks down department barriers and decentralizes decision making to the level of the team. Let’s talk about some of these new options, designed to help organizations do business in today’s world. “Post-bureaucratic” organizational structures continue to be developed to enhance how organizations do business and remain competitive. Identify modern organizational design options.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |