Changing the Organizational Structure of a Failing Organization, Research Paper Example

Introduction

When estimating the change of structure in an existing business, one should take the advantages and disadvantages of each type of business organization into consideration from a perspective of family, personal, or business objectives. The finest business structure will not necessarily be the same for various business types and the most suitable business organization might be altered as business and personal goals ultimately change. After calculating the pros and cons of each type of business structure, one should discuss a specific crisis situation with tax and legal experts, as far as their suggestions might possibly assist a manager in selecting the right business organization for particular circumstances.

Changing Organizational Structure

When a company is experiencing a crisis, it is important to make certain immediate changes that are going to aid a company in overcoming the difficulties. However, if a newly employed manager is taking the responsibility to fight the crisis, it is essential for him/her to study the company’s business plan, review its mission, goals, and objectives. Reviewing the organizational chart of the company to find the overcrowded top managerial level or the scarcity of the office workers should also be one of the first steps of a manager. The second step is to start creating a new organizational structure by linking the existing departments or create new departments wherever it might be necessary. It is vital to eliminate useless linking position between the departments that do not cooperate with each other. “The way a structure or culture is designed or evolves over time affects the way people and groups behave within the organization. Once an organization decides how it wants its members to behave, what attitudes it wants to encourage, and what it wants its members to accomplish, it can then design its structure and encourage the development of the cultural values and norm to obtain these desired attitudes, behaviors, and goals” (Organizational Structure). Once a clear picture of a new organization is created, a manager should communicate the alterations to the Human Resource department for it to commence the implementation of the changes on legal and feasible basis.

Realigning Individuals

“Proper people-process alignment is achieved when sufficient numbers of well prepared people are readily available to support business processes” (Rohan). Ineffective alignment commonly arises when people in charge of supporting processes at any organization level turn out to be unwilling or incapable of functioning to productively enable. Many of these difficulties might be traced to insufficient training, shortage of resources, competing work requirements, and conflicting priorities. Other alignment disorders take place, as far as people are not dedicated to the given roles. They frequently are unsuccessful to observe the value of the tasks, projects, and tools that sustain development. Consequently, it is vital for a new manager to align the people, in order to fight the crisis of a company. “People who are solidly aligned to process will function more productively as individuals and as team members” (Rohan). A manager is able to create strong people-process relationships by following a few simple steps that stimulates peoples’ natural reactions. Each step provides additional potency to the configuration. Alignment collisions are prevented, and self-correcting collaboration systems reconfigure to adjust process and enabler failures. The steps in question include: initiating engagement in a business process with personal/individual assignments; creating mini-problem solving teams; building synergetic equal teams; creating teams that focus on responsibility.

Steps and Policies

Change management involves careful planning and delicate execution, and primarily, discussion with, and participation of, the people influenced by the modifications. If a manager forces the change on employees, as a rule problems occur. The change, which is going to save the company or lessen the harmful effect of the market share loss must be practical, realistic and perceptible. Being a new manager in a company, I will use workshops as a main transitional mechanism to motivate and improve the overall performance. “Workshops combine training, development, team-building, communications, motivation and planning” (Chapman). Participation and interest of staff adds to the sense of possession and empowerment, and assists in the development of groups and individuals. Workshops are extremely efficient in managing change and improvement, and predominantly the formation of initiatives, plans, methods and actions to accomplish particular business and organizational objectives. Workshops are also excellent for breaking down obstacles, enhancing interactions inside and outside of departments, and integrating staff during a change in the organizational structure. “Workshops are an extremely flexible and effective method for training, learning, development, change management, team building and problem solving, and virtually any organizational challenge” (Chapman). It is important to remember that regular employees fear the change in the organization and find it extremely disturbing and intimidating.

Conclusion

As a manager my task is to create an organizational structure that will encourage the employees to work hard and burn the midnight oil. At the same time the created system is supposed to allow the staff to work together, cooperate, and show tangible results. The structure of the company directly affects the motivation, behavior, relations, and cooperation between the people, which, consequently, affects the benefits of everyone.

References

Rohan, Dennis. Aligning People with Business Processes:Building Robust, Self-Correcting Alignments. (2008). Retrieved May 17, 2009, from http://www.businessprocesstrends.com/publicationfiles/THREE-06-08-ART-AligningPeoplewithBusProcesses-Rohan.doc-final.pdf

Organizational Structure. Retrieved May 17, 2009, from http://dept.lamar.edu/industrial/Underdown/org_mana/Org_Structure_George.htm

Chapman, Alan. Workshops. (2005). Running workshops for motivation, team-building and improving performance. Retrieved May 17, 2009, from http://www.businessballs.com/changemanagement.htm