Organizational Structure

An organization comes into existence as soon as multiple people start working together to achieve a shared goal. In their collaboration, people make agreements about who will do what. This applies on a small scale to creating a group assignment, and on a large scale to making agreements about how marketing is organized and how responsibilities are allocated within a Board of Directors. Once you have made agreements about the division of tasks, you then make follow-up agreements on how to coordinate these tasks with one another. First, you need to think about how the work is divided; in technical terms, this is called differentiation. Next, you need to agree on how to integrate the subtasks back into a coherent whole. This is also called.

Topics
- Coordination mechanisms
- Organizational chart
- Specialization – standardization
- Staff–line organization
- Principles of structuring (task, product, market)

Starting Points

Key Points

The student can identify what type of structure an organization has and explain how that structure influences the functioning of the organization.
The student can distinguish between different types of organizational structures.
The student can create an organizational chart for an organization.
The student is familiar with aspects of tasks, such as broad and narrow tasks.