Talent Management - Structure
Is your organisational structure supporting or hindering your organisational goals?
The relationship between strategy and structure has been researched extensively; inappropriate or deficient structures become evident through inter-departmental conflict, the organisation will struggle to adapt to changes in its environment and decision making process is poor.
Structure also affects the focus of employees; teams working in a divisional structure based upon geographical regions will tend to become experts in the specific attributes of their region. In the same way, if people are grouped together according to which customer groups they work with, then they will develop their expertise accordingly.
The organisational structure needs to be evaluated at three levels:
- Macro structure: the roles or "boxes" that appear on an organization chart and how these boxes are connected. Some of the most common macro structures are:
- Entrepreneurial Structures
- Functional Structures
- Divisional Structures
- Matrix Structures
- Virtual or Network Structure
- Micro structure: how the roles, responsibilities and decision-making authority of the units/positions in the macro structure are defined. A flexible, responsive and fast moving organisation needs a deformalized structure allowing devolution of responsibility to frontline staff. This allows a flat structure, with few management levels but required a tolerance for making mistakes and little hierarchy and bureaucracy.
Organisations that need to get every detail right require more bureaucracy and attention to detail and this requires a more hierarchical structure.
In reality, most organisations fall somewhere between the two, allowing creativity in some areas but more checking by management in others.
Supporting Systems: how the operational and management systems are designed to support the effective implementation of the macro and micro structure.