Organizational Structures, Charts, Leadership Styles & Job Descriptions

Organizational Structures, Charts, Leadership Styles & Job Descriptions

Introduction

The organizational structure is the design pattern or model with which an entity is organized to meet the proposed organizational goals and achieve the desired goal. To select an appropriate structure, it is necessary to understand that every company is different in nature, and may adopt the organizational structure that best suits their needs and priorities. The structure must engage and respond to planning, also must reflect the situation of the organization, for example, age, size, type of production system the degree to which the environment is complex and dynamic, and so on (Blankenship and Miles, 2008). Depending on the nature of the business, companies establish different types of organizational structure to match with their operations. The paper discusses how businesses organize and structure their staff members and how they display that organization in terms of organizational charts. The need and usage of job description is also discussed. Three leadership styles are compared and contrasted. The paper also includes Hierarchy, Departmentalization, and Centralization versus decentralization of authority. The information regarding organizational structure, job descriptions, leadership styles are then analyzed for the home healthcare industry.

Background

Organizational structure includes the ways in which the activities in an organization are divided, grouped and coordinated, and the relationships between managers and employees are carried out. Businesses organize the staff in different ways. The departments of an organization can be structured formally in three basic ways, which are by function, by product/marketing or in the matrix form.

Functional organization

The organization brings together all the functions in a department format, that are engaged in one activity or several related functions. It is the kind of organizational structure, which applies the principle of functional specialization of functions for each task. It is likely that the functional organization is the most logical and follows basic structure of division departments (Jelinek, 2010). This format is generally used by small businesses that offer a limited line of products because it enables leverage specialized resources efficiently. It greatly facilitates the monitoring because each manager must be expert in only a limited area of ??knowledge and skills such as finance, human resource and production (Aiken et al, 2000). 

Organization by product / marketing

The organization by product or marketing, often called organization by division, meets in a work unit to everyone involved in producing and marketing a product or a related group of products or all dealing with some type of customer. When the division department of a company becomes too complex to coordinate the functional structure, top management, usually semi-creates divisions. In each division, managers and employees design, produce and market their own products (Standish, 2000). The organization by product or marketing can do one of these three patterns: product division, geographic division, which is used by service providers, financial and other non-factory-and customer division, where the organization is divided according to the different uses that customers make the products (Aiken et al, 2000).

Matrix Organization

The matrix structure is sometimes called multiple control ...