A company structure
| Introduction Starting your business career or/and choosing a job from various job advertisements the future graduate has to know very well the company's structure, for which he will probably work. He has to know exactly where his job position will be and where it belongs to company structure.We are sure that what we have put on this page can facilitate the importance and solve problems related to this activity. When you have finished doing the exercises you can check how well you did in our Answers to exercises. If some words or phrases are too tough for you, you can always check the dictionary . A company structure: (different ways of organising companies) Most organisations have hierarchical or pyramidal structure, with one or a group of people at the top, and an increasing number of people below them at each successive level. There is a clear line or chain of command running down the pyramid. All the people in the organisation know what their superior is (to whom they report), and who their immediate subordinates are (to whom they can give instructions). Some people in an organisation have colleagues who help them: for example, there might be an Assistant to the Marketing Manager. This is known as a staff position: its holder has no line authority, and is not integrated into the chain of command, unlike, for example, the Assistant Marketing Manager, who is number two in the marketing department. Yet the activities of most companies are too complicated to be organised in a single hierarchy. Shortly before the first world war, the French industrialist Henry Fayol organised his coal-mining business according to the functions that it had to carry out. He is generally credited with inventing functional organisation. Today, most large manufacturing organisations have a functional structure, including production, finance, marketing, sales, and personnel or staff departments. This means, for example, that the production and marketing departments cannot take financial decisions without consulting the finance department. Functional organisation is efficient, but there are two standard criticisms. Firstly, people are usually more concerned with the success of their department than that of the company, so there are permanent battles between, for example, finance and marketing, or marketing and production, which have incompatible goals. Secondly,separating functions is unlikely to encourage innovation. Yet for a large organisation manufacturing a range of products, having a single production department is generally inefficient. Consequently, most large companies are decentralised, following the model of A. Sloan, who divided GM into separate operating divisions in 1920. Each division had its own engineering, production and sales departments, made a different category of car, and was expected to make a profit. Businesses that cannot be divided into autonomous divisions with their own markets can simulate decentralisation, setting up divisions that deal with each other using internally determined transfer prices. Many banks, for example, have established commercial, corporate, private banking, international and investment divisions. An inherent problem of hierarchies is that people at lower levels are unable to make important decisions, but have to pass on responsibility to their boss. One solution to this is matrix management, in which people report to more than one superior. For example, a product manager with an idea might be able to deal directly with managers responsible for a certain market segment and for a geographical region, as well as the managers responsible for the traditional functions of finance, sales and production. This is one way of keeping authority at lower levels, but it is not necessarily a very efficient one. Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman, in their well-known book "In Search of Excellence", insist on the necessity of pushing authority and anatomy down the line, but they argue that one element - probably the product - must have priority; four - dimension matrices are far too complex. A further possibility is to have wholly autonomous, temporary groups or teams that are responsible for an entire project, and are split up as soon as it is successfully completed. Teams are often not very good for decision-making, and they run the risk of relational problems, unless they are small and have a lot of self-discipline. In fact they still require a definite leader, on whom their success probably depends. Exercise 1 If you have read the text above try to label the diagrams, according to which of these they illustrate. If not, read it (even twice) and then do the exercise. line structure matrix structure functional structure staff structure Exercise 2 Choose the word that does not belong in each horizontal group. 1. business company society subsidiary 2. salary manager salesman employee 3. finance product research marketing 4. distributing selling assembling promoting 5. components tools hardware strategy 6. end user customer client distributor Exercise 3 Which of the groups of three words that you identified above (in exercise 2) refer to the following definitions? a.people who buy goods or services ......................................... b.types of commercial organisations ......................................... c.different departments or functions ......................................... d.people who work inside a company ....................................... e.activities that involve meeting customers ............................... f.products that can be sold ....................................... Exercise 4 Match each of the words that you have chosen (in exercise 2) with the following: 1........................ a monthly payment in exchange for work 2........................ an item that has been made 3........................ a plan of action 4........................ a non-profit-making organisation 5........................ putting parts together 6........................ a person or business which has an agreement to sell the goods of another firm Answers to exercises |