Post for week 4

This week we continued to look at management structures and how they might affect the productivity of a company. We continued to look at what an organisational structure is, which according to Charles Handy is the allocation of formal responsibilities and the linking mechanisms of roles and also the co-ordinating structures of the organisation. However, we also learnt that some small firms may not need an organisational structure to run as the number of employees may be too small but as the business continues to grow the organisation would need one.
The reading for the week included chapter 10 of the David Boddy textbook. The reading dwelled on 'The Developing Organisation' which looked at how companies could implement structure to help improve their strategy it also looked at how external changes in the society could the internal structure of a business. The reading also included chapter 13 from the J Mullins management and organisational behaviour  textbook. The reading basically covered managerial behaviour and effectiveness.
During the week we also looked at the division of work in a company. This is basically dividing the jobs in a company into different departments in order to make productivity easier. This could include a finance department, a human resources department etc. We basically learnt that work could be divided by different intentions, work could be divided by function, work could be divided by product or service, it could be divided by location or it could be divided by customer. Most large companies would tend to try and put all these sorts of work divisions into practice.

We also learnt that work could be centralised or decentralised. When work is centralised this means that the company is run by the main directors of the company. Decentralised management is when lower level employees are llowed to make decisions which may help because they are directly linked to the customers. We also looked at spans of control which refer to employees that report directly to a given manager. A chain of command which is linked to a span of control also refers to the levels of the organisational structure in a company.

Finally we looked at matrix structures which just show how an employee could be working directly for more than one person.