Organising

Planning is regarded as the blue print for business actions and decisions, while organizing provides the framework for  carrying out business actions and decisions.Organising kicks in after planning,for a plan to be successful,organising must take place,coupled with control.Organising therefore is the process of arranging the flows of people,material and resources so as to accomplish stated objectives with a minimum consumption of each resource.organising is the means by which management co-ordinates material and human resources through a design of formal structure of tasks and authority.




Porter, et al, (1975) summarize the widely cited definition of organization by conceptualizing it in the following salient features:
1) social entities in which people interact with each other and the environment.
2) Purposeful and goal oriented
3) Differentiation of functions and positions that are intended to be consciously and rationally planned, coordinated and directed, on a continuous basis through time.
Organizing can be defined as the organization and structuring of work to achieve organizational goals. It entails designing an organizational structure by the management.

What then is an organizational structure?
An organizational structure is the formal arrangement of jobs within an organization.
The creation or change of an organizational structure is called organizational design and it involves decisions about six key elements which are:
1)  Work specialization
2)  Departmentalization
3)  Chain of command
4)  Span of control
5) Centralization and decentralization
6)  Formalization.

Now lets analyse each one of them

1) Work Specialization: Work specialization is dividing work activities into separate job tasks. It can also  be known as division of labour with an element of specialization. Specialization involves the leaning comprehensively the steps and processes of carrying out one part of an activity and being a master at it. It involves individuals specializing and doing one part of an activity rather than the entire activity in order to increase output. Work specialization makes effective use of the skill set of workers. For example in some organizations, some tasks require highly developed skills, while some other tasks can be done by employees with lower skill set. Early proponents of work specialization believed that it could lead to great increases in productivity. At the beginning of the twentieth century, that generalization was reasonable. Because specialization was not widely practiced, its introduction almost always generated higher productivity.


2) Deparmentalization: It is through departmentalization that related jobs, activities, or processes are grouped into major organizational subunits. For example, all jobs involving staffing activities such as recruitment, hiring, and training are often grouped into a human resources department. Also all jobs involving stock taking, preparation of accounts, auditing, preparation of the financial statements, balancing accounts amd so on are often grouped into the Accounting department. Grouping jobs
through the formation of departments, according to management author James D. Thompson, “permits coordination to be handled in the least costly manner.''
Effective management and coordination is achieved in departmentalization, because members of the department work on interrelated tasks and are guided by the same departmental rules and report to the same departmental head.

They are five basic types of deparmentalization which are:

1) Functional departments
2) Product-service department
3) Geographic location departments
4) Customer classification department
5) Workflow department



i) Functional department: Functional departmentis a type of departmentalization that groups employees according to the type of activity performed. The advantage here is that employees with the same skill set and similar expertise are mostly grouped together, and work in the same sub unit.
The disadvantage here is that it tends to form loyalties whereby departments might be rebelling against each other.


ii) Product- service department: In this a product or service is the main reason for departmetalization. Departmentalization occurs based on the needs of each product or service, and this brings about a specialization of each department under each product. For example lets say there are two products, X and Y, there may be the Production, Finance, and Marketing department under product X and also the Production, Finance and Marketing department under product Y.

iii) Geographical Location department: In this case for international or global organizations, the location or geographical location dictates the structural format. For example a marketing manager in london would be able to judge consumer tastes in england better than a marketing manager from toronto.

iv) Customer classification department: This centers on various customer categories. Customer classification departmentalization shares a weakness with the product-service and geographic location approaches: all three can create costly duplication of personnel and facilities


v)  Work flow process department: work flow process departments are called horizontal organizations because emphasis is on the smooth and speedy horizontal flow of work between two key points: (1) identifying customer needs and (2) satisfying the customer




3) Chain of command: Chain of command is the line of authority extending from upper organizational level to lower levels. It clarifies who you answer or report to.
There are three concepts in the chain of command which are:

a) Authority: Authority the power or right to give orders, make decisions, and enforce obedience. Managers in the chain of command have authority to their job of coordinating and over seeing the work of others. Chester Barnard, proposed another perspective on authority. This view, called the acceptance theory of authority, says that authority comes from the willingness of subordinates to accept it. If an employee didn’t accept a manager’s order, there was no authority. Barnard contended that subordinates will accept orders only if the following conditions are satisfied:
i. They understand the order.
ii. They feel the order is consistent with the organization’s purpose.
ii. The order does not conflict with their personal beliefs.
iv. They are able to perform the task as directed.

b) Responsibility:  When managers use their authority to assign work to employees, those employees take on an obligation to perform those assigned duties. This obligation or expectation to perform is known as responsibility



c) Unity of command:The unity of command principle as propagated by fayol in his 14 principles of management states that a person should report to only one manager.






4) Span of control: This deals with the amount of employees a manager can effectively manage and control.The traditional view was that managers could not and should not directly supervise more than five or six subordinates.



5) Centralization and decentralization: Centralization is the degree at which decision takes place at the upper levels of management. If the decisions are taking frequently by the upper level of management and inputs are not sought by and from the lower level management, then the organization is said to be centralized. Meanwhile if the lower level management provide inputs or make decisions on theri own, the orgaization is said to be decentralized.



6) Formalization: It refers to how standardized an organization's jobs are and the extent to which employees follow the rules and regulations of the organization. In highly formalized organizations, there are strict rules, regulations and procedures over every job the employee must follow, and also explicit job descriptions. The employee has little discretion over how things are done and mostly cannot take decisions on their own. In a situation where formalization is low, employees have more discretion in how they do their work.