Organizational Structure: Departmentalization, Authority, and Communication
Departmentalization
Departmentalization is the grouping of jobs, tasks, processes, and resources into logical units to perform an operation within an organization.
The criteria for departmentalization are:
- Skill: The variety of talents required to complete a task. Work that requires initiative and creativity tends to be more skilled than work which is operational and repetitive.
- Autonomy: The extent to which the individual who performs a task has the freedom to plan and schedule the work program.
- Dimension: Work that involves completing a product may provide greater satisfaction and create a clearer job identity than work that is a small part of the overall process.
- Significance: The extent to which work affects other people, either in terms of health and safety or in terms of the dependence of other people on the completion of the tasks involved.
- Feedback: The extent to which an individual receives information about the effectiveness of completed work.
Authority and Delegation
Authority is the power related to each position within the organization; it involves the right to give orders, make decisions, and spend resources. Power is the ability to carry out an action. Responsibility is an obligation to be liable for a task, decision, or action.
Consultation and Negotiation
Negotiation means that two or more parties meet in an attempt to reach a solution systematically.
Consultation may provide:
- A communications channel in which management, having made a decision, simply informs employee representatives of the decisions that have been made.
- A forum in which management seeks the views, feelings, and ideas of employees prior to making a decision, while retaining the right to make that decision.
- A structure by which employees’ views are made a part of a joint decision process.
Negotiating skills involve:
- Testing and summarizing what is being agreed to make sure that everybody interprets the substance of the agreement in the same way – an agreement has to work, and ignoring even small points of dispute will make this very difficult.
- Understanding the other side’s needs in order to discover and explore the common ground.
- Communicating the reasons for a particular suggestion or action so that the other side knows what the motives are for a particular policy.
- Assessing the process of negotiating to see if it could be improved.
Organizational Communication
Organizational communication is the provision and passing of information and instructions which enables a company or any employing organization to function efficiently and employees to be properly informed about developments. It covers information of all kinds which can be provided; the channels along which it passes; and the means of passing it (ACAS).
Types of Communication
- Downward communication: From managers to other employees, house journals, company newspapers.
- Upward communication: To tap into employees’ knowledge and opinions, suggestion schemes, and attitude surveys.
- Horizontal communication: Between individuals and teams, between departments or work groups.
- E-mail.
- Intranet.
Models of Communication
One criticism of the Shannon and Weaver model is that communication is seen as only a one-way process. Check page 250 and 254.