About Organizational Structure

An organizational structure is a group of policies, strategies and tasks efficiently arranged to collectively accomplish an objective. Their arrangement is specific to the particulars of their objective, the same way fast-food restaurants are concerned with being "fast." These groups of policies, strategies and tasks making up organizational structures can be reduced further into sub-groups involving how those policies are enforced, the way strategies are prioritized and how simplified tasks are distributed throughout the structure. Fast-food restaurants are good examples of how the cooking process can be reduced to a set of ultra-simple tasks requiring little or no cooking skills.

Functional Organizational Structures

A functional organizational structure is concerned with matching an employee's set of skills to specific tasks that best accommodates those skills. For example, a customer's "first point of contact" should never be with an employee suffering with aggression issues, but otherwise is excellent at arranging heavy boxes in the back office. A functional organizational structure would identify his weaknesses and strengths and assimilated him into the organization accordingly.

Bureaucratic Organizational Structures

Bureaucratic organizational structures are usually large, mature, formal and complex structures involving a set of highly routine activities tightly supervised under a centralized authority. Examples of bureaucratic structures are banks, government institutions and car manufacturing companies. Sections of bureaucratic organizational structures are often categorized into departments or divisions, then further divided into sub-divisions. For example, the U.S. Department of Education is part of a "bureaucracy type structure" with a centralized authority involving decision-making from the top-down.

Network Structures

Many information technology businesses operate as a network structure. These structures are concerned with outsourcing tasks to a network specializing in a variety of services. For example, many online magazines adopt a business model involved in maintaining a minimal full-time staff essential for the organization's core functions, while outsourcing all other jobs to graphic designers, photographer, writers, marketing consultants and computer programmers.

The Family Unit

A family unit is an organizational structure ideally consisting of a long-term arrangement between two adults or a "co-partnership" sharing mutually agreed-upon tasks to nurture their offspring safely into adulthood. From time to time, parents may assign marginal tasks or "chores" to their children, thereby easing the burden of routine upkeep.

Inefficiencies in Organization Structures

Flow of communication is critical in any organizational structure. For example, the flow of communication throughout a family unit is essential for the parents to make effective decisions specific to their nurturing objectives. Some family units may, unfortunately, experience a "culture of fear" a term frequently used to describe disempowering business environments where good ideas are suppressed because of fear of being ridiculed.
A culture of fear within family settings may involve disproportionate financial contributions from one member of the family unit, causing the other member to be abnormally cautious when communicating for fear of being displeasing. This lack of communication usually allows for ineffective decision making, following a possible divorce of mutually shared interests.