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Organisation structure and design
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Table of Contents 1 SYNOPSIS 3 2 INTRODUCTION 4 3 STRUCTURE 4 4 INFLUENCES ON STRUCTURE 5 4.1 SIZE 5 4.2 STRATEGY 5 4.3 ENVIRONMENT 6 4.4 TECHNOLOGY 6 5 ORGANISATIONAL EFFECTIVENESS 7 6 CURRENT STRUCTURAL PROBLEMS 8 7 SOLUTIONS 8 7.1 SOLUTION ONE 8 7.2 SOLUTION TWO 9 8 RECOMMENDATIONS 9 9 CONCLUSION 10 1 Synopsis Analysis has found that Spotless Services operates a costly divisional structure with both horizontal and spatial differentiation and there is minimal communication between business units. The decentralised decision making process risked business units making decisions that were not in line with company strategies. Technology was found to have the greatest impact on structure. Technology is complex with analysability and variety differing greatly between departments and business units. Effectiveness was measured by considering and the satisfaction of stakeholders at a business unit level. The process did not take into account how the results compared to overall organisational performance. Outputs alone were considered at the organisational level. It was recommended that Spotless Services should immediately create an additional business unit responsible for administration services to reduce overhead costs and assist with delivering consistency to business processes. There would be a number of displaced employees who would need to be redeployed or given redundancy packages. The second recommendation was to create an internet web site to facilitate valuable internal communication between divisions. 2 Introduction Spotless Services, part of the Spotless Group of Companies, core business activity is the management of outsourced service contracts. The purpose of this report is to determine the structure of Spotless Services, influences that impact structure and what steps can be taken improve business processes and hence organisational performance. 3 Structure Spotless operates a divisional structure. Each business units consists of product lines that serve a particular market sector. Business units are responsible for their own support resources ie Accounting and HR, as well as profit and loss. Each business unit focuses on different products, customers and competitors and there is little interaction between them. Therefore, there is a high degree of horizontal differentiation where the nature of tasks performed and education and training will differ greatly between business units (Robbins, 1998). Functional specialisation exists as individuals belong to divisions within each unit according to the activities they perform (Robbins et al). Many employees are adopted from Spotless clients when a contract is won and these staff remain located at the client premises. This represents a high level of spatial differentiation as a significant number of employees are dispersed geographically (Robbins et al). Although not in the one location, staff must deliver consistent levels of service and therefore require defined role descriptions and procedures for business processes resulting in a highly formalised environment (Robbins et al.). As staff must respond to unique requests from their customers, the type of formalisation is socialisation, which means that processes are not necessarily repetitive and routine rather that individuals must learn the values, norms and behaviors that are expected of them (Robbins et al).
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