Chapter 10
•
Organizing:
the process through which managers design an organization’s
structure
•
Six key elements of organizational design that involves decision making:
work
specialization, departmentalization, chain of command, span of control,
centralization and decentralization, and formalization
•
Work specialization:
an entire work activity is not done by one individual, but
instead is broken down into tasks with each task completed by a different
person
o
Adam Smith:
first identified division of labor and concluded that it
contributed to increased employee productivity
•
Departmentalization:
after work activities have been divided up through work
specialization into separate job tasks, common job tasks need to be grouped
back together so the work can be done in a coordinated, integrated way
o
Process Departmentalization:
work activities follow a natural processing
flow of products or even of customers
o
Customer Departmentalization:
Helps managers better monitor customers’
needs and respond to changes in those needs
•
Chain of command:
less important today, but managers still need to consider
its implications when deciding how best to structure their organization
o
Three concepts of chain of command:
authority, responsibility, and unit of
command
o
An organization’s managers are given a certain degree to do their job of
coordinating and overseeing the work of other people (authority); as
managers assign work to employees, those employees assume an
obligation to perform any assigned duties (responsibility)
o
Unity of command:
preserves the concept of a continuous line of authority;
without it, conflicting demands and priorities from multiple bosses can
create problems
•
Span of control:
to a large degree, it determines the number of levels and
managers an organization has
o
All things being equal, the wider or larger the span, the more efficient
the
organization (mostly in terms of cost)
o
Influenced by the skills and abilities of the manager and the employees and
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- Fall '08
- Clevenger
- Management, Departmentalization
-
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