28-09-2012, 04:59 PM
Concepts of Organizing
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The working relationships — vertical and horizontal associations between individuals and groups — that exist within an organization affect how its activities are accomplished and coordinated. Effective organizing depends on the mastery of several important concepts: work specialization, chain of command, authority, delegation, span of control, and centralization versus decentralization. Many of these concepts are based on the principles developed by Henri Fayol.
Work specialization
One popular organizational concept is based on the fundamental principle that employees can work more efficiently if they're allowed to specialize. Work specialization, sometimes called division of labor, is the degree to which organizational tasks are divided into separate jobs. Employees within each department perform only the tasks related to their specialized function.
When specialization is extensive, employees specialize in a single task, such as running a particular machine in a factory assembly line. Jobs tend to be small, but workers can perform them efficiently. By contrast, if a single factory employee built an entire automobile or performed a large number of unrelated jobs in a bottling plant, the results would be inefficient.
Despite the apparent advantages of specialization, many organizations are moving away from this principle. With too much specialization, employees are isolated and perform only small, narrow, boring tasks. In addition, if that person leaves the company, his specialized knowledge may disappear as well. Many companies are enlarging jobs to provide greater challenges and creating teams so that employees can rotate among several jobs.
Chain of command
The chain of command is an unbroken line of authority that links all persons in an organization and defines who reports to whom. This chain has two underlying principles: unity of command and scalar principle.
• Unity of command: This principle states that an employee should have one and only one supervisor to whom he or she is directly responsible. No employee should report to two or more people. Otherwise, the employee may receive conflicting demands or priorities from several supervisors at once, placing this employee in a no-win situation.
Sometimes, however, an organization deliberately breaks the chain of command, such as when a project team is created to work on a special project. In such cases, team members report to their immediate supervisor and also to a team project leader. Another example is when a sales representative reports to both an immediate district supervisor and a marketing specialist, who is coordinating the introduction of a new product, in the home office.
Delegation
A concept related to authority is delegation. Delegation is the downward transfer of authority from a manager to a subordinate. Most organizations today encourage managers to delegate authority in order to provide maximum flexibility in meeting customer needs. In addition, delegation leads to empowerment, in that people have the freedom to contribute ideas and do their jobs in the best possible ways. This involvement can increase job satisfaction for the individual and frequently results in better job performance. Without delegation, managers do all the work themselves and underutilize their workers. The ability to delegate is crucial to managerial success. Managers need to take four steps if they want to successfully delegate responsibilities to their teams.
Span of control
Span of control (sometimes called span of management) refers to the number of workers who report to one manager. For hundreds of years, theorists have searched for an ideal span of control. When no perfect number of subordinates for a manager to supervise became apparent, they turned their attention to the more general issue of whether the span should be wide or narrow