7th - 13th October 2013, Organizational structure.

This was the first week of my classes at the ISC (International study centre) at University of Sussex and this blog is about my first week of the Business Management classes.
Everything went pretty well, I like the idea of how the group working technique is used, with breaks in between long duration classes (classes of more then an hour) and a little crack of funny jokes in between, making the class and subject interesting, also, dividing one whole group into two, for better attention and interaction between students and their teacher. Moreover, I like the way how they have divided work, responsibilities, students into groups and the communication levels which are the signs of a good ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE,  which was the main focus of the week.

So the week started with a lecture by Vishal Patel, it was a summary of what the whole week would be about,the organizational structure of a company. It was well explained using a chart, how work is divided within an organization, responsibilities are shared by giving roles to all the employees and how the communication levels are built so that everyone is aware of who to report for the work they have done for the smooth running of the organization. Also, theories for instance by Mintzberg, which explained his thought that how an organizational structure divides its labour to achieve co-ordination amongst them which indirectly is important for the performance of a company. Dividing work also creates the chances for specialization which increases the creativity level of a department or a worker itself, that is he becomes more expert in a work which he is doing everyday and gets better ideas with the time on how to do that work more effectively.

After viewing an organizational structure from a distant point of view, it was more over taken to a maximized point of view and discussed on how things work within.

 Chain of command is also one of the things which was discussed in one of the classes,it is the communication network  through which the command moves to the down hierarchy from the top and also formal authority and responsibility is set also and how delegation takes place, where the responsibility of work is given by the top to low level employee but not the final responsibility.

Lets come to span of control now, it is the number of sub-ordinates who are responsible to report directly to an appointed manager. There are two type of span of controls, narrow and wide.
If the span of control is narrow, there will be many management levels, that would result in a tall organizational structure where as if the span of control is wide, there would be more people working under one manager which would result in a flat organizational structure. 

One of the hot topics of the week was centralization and decentralization decision making. Centralized decision making requires more delegation and more communication is required where decentralized decision making is a strict technique and mostly used for non-motivated staff and non-professional or unskilled workers.

Apart from this, we discussed about mechanistic and organic structures. Mechanistic structures consist high degree of specialisation and works with centralised decision making and is found in tall structures while in organic structures  individuals work together to solve a problems, coordination and fewer rules are required and is found in flatter structures. Lastly, matrix structure was also defined, it is actually nothing but project management.  It works well within an functional structure. Teams are created for a specific project and will be led by a project manager.