How Different Organisational Structures Impact and Affect the Culture within an Organisation - Essay Example

A critical discussion of how different organisational structures impact and affect the culture within an organisation BY YOU YOUR SCHOOL INFORMATION HERE DATE HERE Introduction Organisational culture is a distinct set of beliefs and values that become developed over time that determine the method by which organisational members solve problems, develop team structures, and represent the behavioural norms that drive human activities. Culture is represented by the cohesive norms that will either assist in better goal attainment or reduce staff member commitment (Yilmaz and Ergun 2008). Organizational culture is built by the vision of the organisation, its symbols and communications, and shared assumptions which determine what encompasses appropriate behavioural patterns. When an organisation maintains a culture that maintains cohesive goals and ambitions, the organisation can achieve better competitive advantages, experience more productive outputs, and solve problems more rapidly and efficiently when they have been identified. It is also the organisational structure of the business which maintains a direct influence on the type of culture found in an organisation. Organisational structure determines how tasks and role obligations are allocated, how these tasks are coordinated and the type of supervisory methods utilised to ensure that an organisational achieves its strategic objectives. This essay explores how an organisation’s structure maintains direct impact on the type of organisational culture found within the enterprise, utilising relevant organisational structure examples to illustrate the development of different cultural aspects. Critical review and analytic discussion There are some organisations, such as the Boeing company, which utilises a bureaucratic structure. This type of structure focuses on establishing more managerial controls in an industry where speed, standardisation and high quality are demands of the market. To ensure these productivity outcomes, there is emphasis on strict employee subordination and the organisation develops clearly defined job roles and there is a clear division of authority between employees and managers; a hierarchical structure (Jacobides 2007). This structure establishes norms and behaviours where productivity, efficiency, cost controls and waste reduction are primary goals of the organisation and this can have a trickle down effect on the types of behaviours illustrated by employees. The bureaucratic organisational structure can have substantial impact on culture, both negative and positive. When employees are not given opportunities to express their creativity and share in decision-making, it can reduce perceptions of autonomy. Research indicates that employees are usually more committed toward achieving organisational goals when the organisation provides opportunities for autonomous work (Langfred and Moye 2004). Therefore, the organisation utilising a bureaucratic structure may develop a culture of resentment and lack of motivation toward achieving organisational goals. One organisation that can illustrate a negative impact on culture using a bureaucratic system is the Sony Corporation, a Japanese organisation that has strict control systems, substantial power distance between employees and managers, and a vision of compliance and top level performance and productivity. This demotivated employees and raised turnover rates. To create a culture of commitment, Sony determined that breaking down the obstacles of a centralised, bureaucratic structure would be beneficial to ensure that there was more collaboration and urgency in problem-solving as a cultural behavioural norm. Sony began to work toward building a matrix structure that would provide a blend of autonomy and control. Sony wanted to enter the video gaming industry and realised that it would take the functional knowledge and experience of disparate organisational members to develop a console that would have market relevancy and profitability. The business management began to promote a vision of collaboration and teamwork, which changed the culture to one of politics to one of negotiation and experiential learning. As a result of these changes and allowing employees to share in decision-making, under a more decentralised organisational structure, the firm launched the Playstation console which now provides the firm with a 290 percent increase in total operating revenues (Parfitt 2014). This could not have been accomplished without removing the strong bureaucracy that once had a vision of employee control and compliance and transforming the company with an organisational structure of team ideology most closely aligned with a functional structure or matrix structure. Yet another organisation that utilises the autocratic structure is RyanAir, a very competitive player in the airline industry. Being a cost leader is critical to this organisation therefore productivity, quality, and urgency are important mission concepts. Over time, to achieve these goals, the airline organisation has developed very strong employee control systems (Nortilli and Wong 2014). In this firm’s structure, employees do not collaborate with one another and communications are minimal in an environment with strong, control-focused supervision. This autocratic structure has caused problems with establishing a cohesive culture at the organisation. The problems start with the abrupt personality and attitude of the organisation’s CEO, Michael O’Leary, who has made public statements that the customer is wrong and customer segments should go away if they are looking for anything more than budget prices and efficiency. Being the autocratic leader that defies opportunities for employees to challenge the poor customer service ideology at the firm, it establishes a culture that adopts the vision of the CEO: a compliance-based culture that does not maintain motivation or a vision toward improving customer service problems. Sparrow (2013) recognises that this abrupt culture, under the guidance of an autocratic and outspoken CEO, requires adjustment. The bureaucratic structure with considerable management controls and expectations for compliance toward cost control ideologies has built a culture of non-commitment and only engaging in job role tasks that will avoid castigation or other punishments. This autocratic structure, therefore, should be recognised as a contributor toward the development of a culture that maintains a norm of socio-professional exclusion and simply performing tasks according to a set of compliance standards. However, the bureaucratic structure does have benefits on culture. Compliance systems and control strategies can create a culture where it has become a behavioural norm to remain focused on efficiency and productivity. Through subordination, employees working in this structure become accustomed to high quality output where the vision of the firm is to be quality-centric that impacts how employees work with stakeholders and perform their job roles. This structure can theoretically create a culture where poor performance is frowned upon by employee peers, which forces poor-performing employees to become more efficient to avoid castigation for failing to meet productive job role outcomes. Other organisations operate under the matrix structure, one which groups its staff members in terms of product and function. Teams are utilised as a means of ensuring quality of work outputs and projects, often with a project leader that is given authority to oversee special projects. In this structure, there are generally many different projects being carried out and this ideology provides opportunities for both autonomous work and closely-managed worker activities. In the matrix structure, problems are identified more rapidly and the company develops various committees to analyse and correct these issues. The matrix structure creates a culture that focuses on urgency, where problems identified have employees and managers working to correct them quickly (Sy and D’Annunzio 2005). These structures can set the behavioural norm where employees work more diligently on problem-solving and working as a team to negotiate solutions to these issues. The matrix structure creates less of a political structure where employees are concerned about preserving their power and authority and where collaboration becomes the established ideology. Some aspects of decentralisation that is found in the matrix structure provides more opportunities for sharing in decision-making and correcting issues in the organisational model, thereby establishing a culture that is motivated and committed toward cooperation, teamwork and correcting issues quickly to ensure efficiency and productivity. The matrix structure, by design, shows employees that the management team trusts in their competency and ability to formulate solutions to organisational issues. Hence, the vision becomes mutual support and allowing all employees to find new methodologies to ensure best practices are developed. The cultural norm then becomes cross-training on multiple aspects of the organisation to develop a relevant culture of knowledge and proficiency. Giving employees opportunities to be more involved in organisational decision-making and problem-solving creates a culture where team ideology becomes the established norm and all members share the values of associated with partnership and alliance which builds strong socio-professional relationships that can contribute to an organisation’s competitive advantages. The examples provided by Boeing and Ryanair seem to dictate more of a need for leadership, an important component in the management process. Employees, if they are to adopt the vision and beliefs of managers and high level executives, would seem to need to perform their job roles in a work environment that focuses on collaboration, team negotiations and have opportunities to express their creativity in shared decision-making and have opportunities for autonomous job functions. For example, the matrix structure allows opportunities for employees to get to know one another and create informal networks that facilitate more efficient collaboration and the ability work competently with managers and peers (Sy and D’Annunzio). However, it the management team itself that must establish this type of decentralised organisational structure if employees are to adopt the same vision and begin focusing on having a cohesive set of values related to problem-solving and team functioning. In the aforementioned example of RyanAir, management sets the tone for culture under this bureaucratic organisational structure where there is less focus on group negotiation and desire to work inter-professionally to achieve more significant and productive organisational outcomes. In the RyanAir example, the CEO, himself, sets the symbols by which other employees adopt the same mentality of not focusing on superior customer service in an environment where the organisation has not made appropriate steps to decentralise or focus on the more soft aspects of human resource management. To illustrate, Ryanair was reported as charging a significant fee for a customer that needed to change flights after his entire family had perished in a horrible fire (BBC News 2013). Most likely, at least theoretically, if the autocratic structure had been altered to become a more collaboration-based organisation, then the employees of this organisation would have been more diligent in assisting the client rather than simply charging him an excessive fee and not bringing this important service issue to the attention of supervision. This illustrates, again, how a centralised and autocratic structure can create a culture of non-commitment where merely performing one’s job role tasks efficiently is the only real concern or vision as an established set of behavioural norms. Conclusion As illustrated by the research, an organisation’s structure can have a direct impact, both negative and positive, on the type of culture that exists at a firm. Though there are many different types of organisational structures that organisation’s can develop and implement (other than those discussed in this essay), it is clear that communications, symbols, ideologies and behaviours will dictate how employees of the firm adopt these same principles and hold these values as guiding behaviours in their job roles. This essay explored the matrix structure, the bureaucratic and autocratic structures to emphasise the significant impact that structure can have on organisational culture. They can create cultures of non-commitment toward achieving organisational goals or facilitate more cooperative attitudes where teamwork and problem-solving become established values and behavioural norms. Some structures emphasise the importance of opening communications between higher-level management and employees which builds a set of norms where cohesiveness is the main objective. The structure will impact how employees create discourse with their peers and managers and how the business handles stakeholders, very relevant and illustrated in the examples provided with RyanAir operating under a centralised, autocratic structure where the CEO establishes the tone by which all employees mould their customer-service related behaviours. Culture, therefore, should be recognised as having a tremendous impact on culture and if an organisation desires to have more collaboration, negotiation and a culture of commitment, it must carefully consider the method by which the structure is developed and implemented. Whilst there might be other strategies that impact the establishment of a positive culture or a negative culture, it is the structure, itself, that has the most significant impact and therefore should be a consideration of management in order to ensure cohesiveness of the entire organisational staff. References Jacobides, M. (2007). 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