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Different Types of Organizational Structure

Organizations are set up in specific ways to accomplish different goals, and the structure of an organization can help or hinder its progress toward accomplishing these goals. Organizations large and small can achieve higher sales and other profit by properly matching their needs with the structure they use to operate. There are three main types of organizational structure: functional, divisional and matrix structure.

Functional Structure

Functional structure is set up so that each portion of the organization is grouped according to its purpose. In this type of organization, for example, there may be a marketing department, a sales department and a production department. The functional structure works very well for small businesses in which each department can rely on the talent and knowledge of its workers and support itself. However, one of the drawbacks to a functional structure is that the coordination and communication between departments can be restricted by the organizational boundaries of having the various departments working separately.

Divisional Structure 

Divisional structure typically is used in larger companies that operate in a wide geographic area or that have separate smaller organizations within the umbrella group to cover different types of products or market areas. For example, the now-defunct Tecumseh Products Company was organized divisionally--with a small engine division, a compressor division, a parts division and divisions for each geographic area to handle specific needs.

The benefit of this structure is that needs can be met more rapidly and more specifically; however, communication is inhibited because employees in different divisions are not working together. Divisional structure is costly because of its size and scope. Small businesses can use a divisional structure on a smaller scale, having different offices in different parts of the city, for example, or assigning different sales teams to handle different geographic areas.

Matrix 

The third main type of organizational structure, called the matrix structure, is a hybrid of divisional and functional structure. Typically used in large multinational companies, the matrix structure allows for the benefits of functional and divisional structures to exist in one organization. This can create power struggles because most areas of the company will have a dual management--a functional manager and a product or divisional manager working at the same level and covering some of the same managerial territory.

POM in Khan Academy

Changing the Picture of Education - KHAN ACADEMY

Salman Khan, who has 3 degrees from MIT and an MBA from Harvard, developed the website. He originally posted lessons on You Tube for his young cousin and others soon found the lessons to be effective.That is an extremely powerful idea, and it wasn’t available or possible a few years ago. So- Salman Khan began making his videos for his cousins, putting them on YouTube, and we all started to take notice.

KHAN'S VISION

Salman Khan has employed a very successful philanthropic business model, which caters education to anybody with an online access.He asks teachers to consider changing the traditional classroom by allowing students to watch video lectures at home and complete "homework" in the classroom.

Learning

A strength of content-based videos, not just from Khan Academy, is that people can view them during their own time frame, reviewing parts that are of particular interest or to develop greater understanding.The method of instruction emphasizes procedures — how to do math — but ignores the conceptual understanding that’s central to authentic learning: what math means. At its core, this is a function of ineffective instruction, which to a large degree is related to ineffective content.

But one glaring hole has yet to be undertaken: context. Khan Academy is a symptom of a teaching profession where too many teachers are too shy or too old-school to jump into the publishing world. We need that to happen faster. Context is key. Ever wonder why so many of those math videos are boring? You’re missing the context by which they occur in.

The proper thinking that he brought to make students study is just an idea to proceed but what he actually done is far more complex than we can imagine. He has got all the information about each and every student that is taking his online classes i.e where he is lagging ,require improvements.He managed his resources in such a way, to provide every student a review of his progress towards each and every chapter or training he take.

There is proper step wise procedure for a student to go on to a higher level that brings proper understanding and conceptual base. One teacher can't concentrate on each and every student but he made this possible.Progress of each chapter,progress of each topic is in front of us,we can work upon loop holes.This is a proper management,how to use proper resources to get to a result that say 'WOWWWW' ........

 

Khan Academy is part of a looming tech-education iceberg. For excellent learning to take place takes passion on the part of the student. Screens encourage passivity; it's already been documented in laboratory studies. Small classes with good teachers teaching what they're knowledgeable about - that's the ideal learning environment.

There are many who support Khan Academy for its technological ingenuity and its ability to introduce different educational dynamics. The Khan Academy's ability to freely distribute lessons has demonstrated technology's ability to eliminate economic barriers that prevent effective education. Since Benjamin Bloom's 1984 study on the effectiveness of "one-on-one tutoring," close student-teacher interaction has been aggressively sought after. However, both the cost and the realistic implementation of this ideal has been an issue. Critics promote that the Khan Academy has addressed these issues, through both cost-free nature of the site and its wide accessibility via the internet.

Changing trends in Organizational Design & Structure

An organization is a pattern of relationships- many interwoven, simultaneous relationships- through which people, under the direction of managers, pursue their common goals. These goals are the products of the decision-making process and planning. The goals that managers develop through planning are typically ambitious, far-reaching, and open-ended. Managers want to ensure that their organizations can endure for a long time. Members of an organization need a stable, understandable framework within which they can work together toward organizational goals. The managerial process of organizing involves making decisions about creating this kind of framework so that organizations can last from the present well into the future.

Managers must take into account two kinds of factors when they organize. First, they must outline their goals for the organization, their strategic plans for pursuing those goals for the organization, and the capabilities at their organizations for carrying out those strategic plans.

Simultaneously, managers must consider what is going on now, and what is likely to happen in future, in the organization environment. At the intersection of these two sets of factors - plans and environment - managers make decisions that match goals, strategic plans, and capabilities with environmental factors. This crucial first step in organizing, which logically follows from planning, is the process of organizational design. The specific pattern of relationships that managers create in this process is called the organizational structure. Organization structure is a framework that managers devise for dividing and coordination the activities of members of an organization. Because strategies and environmental circumstances differ from one organizational to the next, there are a variety of possible organizational structures.

And with passage of time, these designs and structures have undergone such tremendous changes that they appear completely on a different realm. So much that at times they are barely visible.  

Half-life, Counter-Strike, Portal are words that any person of younger generation can connect to. But behind the success story of these video game series lies a unique structure of their parent company- Valve. In addition to offering company massage rooms and free food, Valve has a unique corporate structure rarely seen at such a large company: Valve has 300 employees but no managers or bosses at all. When they started Valve [in 1996], they thought about what the company needed to be good at. They realized that, their job was to create things that hadn’t existed before. Managers are good at institutionalizing procedures, but in their line of work that’s not always good. Sometimes the skills in one generation of product are irrelevant to the skills in another generation. Their industry is in such technological, design, and artistic flux that they needed somebody who could recognize that.

Even this example shows how members of an organization need a stable, understandable framework within which they can work together toward organizational goals, irrespective of whether they have well defined managers or not. Organizational design is the process of deciding on the appropriate way to divide and to coordinate organizational activity in view of the goals and strategic plan of an organization and the environmental circumstances in which that plan is carried out.

Filling the gaps in an organisation

Every manager knows the power of Teamwork. In fact the very existence of a manager can be attributed to the phenomenon of 'Teams'. If human beings had long decided to do every task individually, the world would have been a totally different place. The Valley Crossing exercise purely focused on learning this phenomenon called 'Teamwork'.

In this exercise there is an important organizational lesson to be learned. Organizations are meant to facilitate the unfathomable.

Here the task is to cross a gap which can be between two tables, two roofs etc. The catch is that it needs to be done by 3 people as a team using a pole, as can be seen in the self explanatory figure above. Some of the learning from this are :

There is one leader at all times. : 
Without a leader, an organization is like a horse cart without a rider; all horses attached to it would take it in different directions and it would end up in a ditch. Same applies to organizations as well. In this activity we see that there is one leader who guides the rest of the team in correct direction.
All are leaders at sometime. :
The role of a person keeps changing within an organization. It is dynamic and is tailored as per the needs. In this activity too we see that when the first person is hanging on the rod, he isn't leading the team, rather it is the second person who is. Everyone plays their role of responsibility and authority as per the common goal.

Real-time communication
This is most necessary for the proper coordination between many players as it helps in the maintenance of “Unity of Command” principle. Effective communication is a prerequisite.

Dynamic role definition for 3 people
This condition helps us in learning that in a team, everyone has to know how to do varied tasks for the over-all achievement of goals and more important than that all the people should get different roles leading to the growth of development of organization.

The team must be told about these practices before they attempt the task and similarly management is supposed to inform the employees about what is expected from them and various aforementioned conditions which will help them in succeeding.

Synchronous movement
It is also necessary to make sure that team does not falter in-between the task and it helps us in learning the “Unity of direction” principle.

The 3 monks

Three Monks is a Chinese animated feature film produced by the Shanghai Animation Film Studio. After the cultural revolution and the fall of the political Gang of Four in 1976, the film was one of the first animations created as part of the rebirth period. The film does not contain any dialogues, allowing it to be watched by any culture, and a different music instrument was used to signify each monk. It is also referred to as The Three Buddhist Priests.

(Source : Wikipedia)

The film is based on the ancient Chinese proverb "One monk will shoulder two buckets of water, two monks will share the load, but add a third and no one will want to fetch water". The plot is as follows: A young monk lives a simple life in a temple on top of a hill. He has one daily task of hauling two buckets of water up the hill. He tries to share the job with another monk, but the carry pole is only long enough for one bucket. The arrival of a third monk prompts everyone to expect that someone else will take on the chore. Consequently, no one fetches water though everybody is thirsty. At night, a rat comes to scrounge and then knocks the candle holder, leading to a devastating fire in the temple. The three monks finally unite together and make a concerted effort to put out the fire. Since then they understand the old saying "unity is strength" and begin to live a harmonious life. The temple never lacks water again.                           

However, beneath this simple story lies some of the very interesting concepts of management : Division and Multiplication of work. In my previous blog, I had explained about the concept of organization and how it evolves from craftsmanship by dividing the work to a level that it eventually doesn't need a craftsman or a highly skilled niche person to do it, rather an automated machine or a layman could do it. But then in this blog, I intend to highlight on multiplying the work and contrast how a mere increase in the number of people doing the job divides the work but it doesn't add to the productivity. Multiplication of work force without an equivalent increase in work done would result in decline of productiveness as we can see in this film.

If one monk needs one bucket of water, then two of them would need two; but if they bring only one, then they would have to go and fetch it again. And we can see clearly this shortage problem when the third monk brings two buckets of water but the other monks don't get to drink any.

Humans have a natural tendency to reduce the work done by them and get the same output. This is good when the reduced workforce is put to some other good use. But if they choose to sit idle then the problem starts. And that's what we see when all the three monks feel thirsty but none of them go to fetch water.

A real manager is like the mouse in the film. He/She sets a fire of motivation amongst the employees so that they use their resources whether it be physical or intellectual for greater productivity. Seeing the fire, the monks forget about their differences and join up together to fetch more buckets of water than they could have imagined in normal circumstances. This helps them to realize that with synergy and efficient process they could multiply the work. And finally they succeed in it. They set up a pulley system with each monk doing a certain task enabling them to fetch not just 3 buckets of water but as much water as they need.

 

This is the core learning from this story also:

Without Cooperation, 1 monk can fetch 2 buckets of water, 2 monks can fetch 1 bucket of water and 3 monks will fetch no water at all. 

With cooperation, 3 monks can increase the efficiency of the process to a level previously unattainable. (Innovation, creativity etc plays an important part).

Thus every manager who profess the importance of team work should also look at the flip side and the negative effects by having an imbalanced team. Pick two top class Singles tennis players, put them in a team and contest against the number one seeded doubles team. Even though individually the latter is weaker, they can beat the superior opposition thanks to coordination and team work.