Business Open Learning Archive
The business student needs insight into the specialist group structures and the functions they perform. An organisation chart is a representation of the functional groupings to be found within the organisation being studied. The chart indicates relationships between and within functional groupings. It shows who does what and who reports to whom and at what level do they work.
The organisation chart for a small business or (within a business) the personnel function shows job titles/functions, levels of direct reporting (superior-subordinate relationships) and may indicate co-ordiative links.
Whilst useful organisation charts are limited in what they show and many other sources of information need to be probed in order to inform our understanding of a business's structure and organisational relationships.
The "structure" of a business is someone's "solution" to the problem of organising that business at a given point in time. It has to be defined and implemented. As the business changes so the structural mappings of the organisation need to be up-dated. Indeed many businesses today are searching for new soultations which avoid rigidities in business practice that they perceive arise from functional specialisation. They want more flexible structures.
Every organisation has a structure and form eg hierarchical, tall, flat, mechanistic, organismic. Functions are "grouped" according to selected criteria of what has to be done, who specialisms need to be introduced, how one function interacts with another to the best adantage of the enterprise as a whole.
The structure of our organisation is represented in an organisation chart and associated implicit or explicit definition of roles, responsibilities, levels of authority and communication/liaison relationships. The organisation chart (a skeleton only) depicts some aspects of the organisations structure. Even when embellished with job descriptions these "representations" don't highlight how people do their jobs, what directions they operate under, how they relate to each other and the types of priority which they as individuals attach to aspects of their work.
Organsational structure is not just a chart - it is the complete embodiment of organisational groupings, hierarchies, delegation of tasks and definition of priorities. The chart is a formal representation of the organisation's structure but informal processes also must be reckoned with.
The informal organisation (people - their loyalties, groupings, expression of loyalties and attitudes) is often not so structurally clear but the processes are nonetheless very powerful. Changes pursued by the formal organsation may be blocked by informal organisation action and resistence.
Organisational policies and plans are structural things - the processes of arriving at these policies, plans and procedures are structural too. Processes include management communicaitons, meetings, techniques used, organisational culture and all aspects of the psychology of organisational life. It is worth noting that formal and informal organisational forms are a status quo - the culmination of solutions to deployment problems.
The organisation structure and the processes it accommodates represents an aggregation of experience, executive preferences, compromise, efforts to find the best grouping to fit past circumstances. It may be that circumstances have changed and that adaptation of the structure is pressing. This means job change, communication, stress for organisational incumbents, training and retraining, perhaps new appointments and many other matters to be addressed. Above all it requires learning by managers, by staff groups, by individuals (whose life patterns may be affected) and by client groups.
