ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE AND CULTURE

Organizational Structure and Culture

Organizational Structure and Culture

Tall/ Bureaucratic Structure

Bureaucratic organizational structure is characterized by a high degree of division of labour, developed a hierarchy of control, chain of command, the presence of numerous rules and regulations for staff behaviour, and staffing of their business and professional qualities. Weber called this structure a "rational" because it is assumed that the decisions taken by the bureaucracy, have an objective character. Weber believed that the personal whim of the owners and staff should not be in conflict with the goals of the organization. These ideas did not coincide completely with the practice of most organizations until 1900 (Egeberg, 2003, pp. 117-127).

If the description of rational bureaucracy will seem familiar to the reader, this is explained by the fact that almost everything of this book about the organizations and the management is concerned primarily rational bureaucratic structures. Bureaucracy is often referred to as classical or traditional organizational structure. Most organizations today are variants of the bureaucracy. The reason for such a long and extensive use of bureaucratic structure is that its performance is still quite well-suited for most industrial companies, service organizations and government agencies of all kinds. The objectivity of the decisions is to efficiently manage the bureaucracy to adapt to change. Promotion of employees based on their expertise can provide constant improvement by such an organization of highly skilled and talented technicians and administrative staff (Egeberg, 2003, pp. 117-127).

Advantages of Tall Structure

It follows standardized processes.

There is a close supervisory control since there is low span of managers.

It is more authoritative structure in which roles and responsibilities are clearly defined.

There is higher control of the top regulation over the organization.

Disadvantage of Tall Structure

The analysis of bureaucratic structures, carried out by Max Weber, remains a unique and most significant description of the nature of modern organizations". However, as discussed, the bureaucratic structures were criticized for their inability to innovate and the lack of sufficient motivation (Egeberg, 2003, pp. 117-127). The decision making Process is slow since it is concentrated with the top management. One more disadvantage of this structure is that the employee motivation is low due to lack of employee involvement in decision making and other strategic processes.

Example of Tall/Bureaucratic Structure

The concept of social equality implicit in the bureaucratic structure is a very good agreement with the value systems of both democratic and communist countries. Civil service in the U.S., for example, is a bureaucracy, originally created in order to curb political patronage and government agencies to transform in accordance with the ideals of the bureaucratic system

Divisional/ Product Structure The product structure provides a hierarchical classification of the items forming a product. With the product structure can be represented the components that make up the product and its attributes. The structure of shows the material product, parts or subassemblies, components and other items hierarchical structure that can represent the group of items of a plane assembly or group of items that meet in a phase of ...