Designing Organizational Structure: The Body Shop Analysis - Term Paper Example

Designing Organizational Structure: The Body Shop Analysis Organizational Structure Organizational structure is the process by which there is the identification of the manner of allocation of a tasks, coordination and the administration all work towards the achievement of certain goals and aims of an organization. Body Shop Organizational Structure The organizational structure of this company is quite basic. At the realm of the table is the head of merchandise. The subordinate heads include various merchandise managers such as the one for Fragrance and accessories. Another one is the person in charge of skin care for men. There is also the Body Hair Care. The last of the group is the planning manager who has the responsibility of seeing through all plans aimed at improving the organization (Daniels, 2014). Challenges associated in design of the organization structure In the design of the company’s organizational structure, there were several challenges encountered that made it difficult to run the daily activities as expected by the board. One of the challenges that the company faced is the issue of differentiation. Differentiation is the process whereby the various characters working in the organization are assigned specific duties to ensure that there is optimal output. The major challenge that comes from differentiation is the inability of the heads to coordinate the differentiated people in the organization. Coordinating these people is difficult because some people are located in different areas of the organization and getting to understand their working is rather a difficult task. It is a difficult task for managers to coordinate different divisions functions and duties to achieve integration. Centralization and decentralization are an integral part in organizational structure. The existence of hierarchy of responsibilities sometimes may lead to irresponsibility and may affect the process of decision-making (Jones, 2009, 46) Elements of Organizational Culture Work Specialization Work Specialization is the extent to which tasks in an organization are split into separate jobs. The main idea is to ensure that one person does not do an entire task. This leads to specialization as individual employees concentrate in doing part of the job rather than whole of it. The jobs get divided into separate projects whereby there are different people to task these jobs in every step of the production process. Work specialization in an organization is very imperative as it ensures that the people involved do not remain lazy depending on the other to carry out particular tasks. Moreover, work specialization is a developed concept in the contemporary environment that ensures that the product quality at the end of the processes is extremely high (Nicholas, 2012, 27). Departmentalization Departmentalization is the manner in which work is put together in a group. Every organization in the modern world has the responsibility of ensuring that work activities are grouped together in a manner that ensures prevalence of the company. There are five major forms of departmentalization. One of the basic forms is functional departmentalization. There is also product departmentalization. Geographical departmentalization is another major form of departmentalization. Process departmentalization also happens to fall in the category followed by customer departmentalization. All these have different concepts with regard to departmentalization. Authority and Responsibility These are found majorly within the chain of command in an organization. This normally runs from the top management flowing all the way down to the junior management. There are three concepts attached to the theory and these are the authority, which has the right to instruct people on the activities to carry out and exactly how to carry them out. There is also the responsibility that is the duty to carry out the given tasks. There is also the unit of command which states or rather follows the rubric that each individual in a particular setting ought to report to a particular manager (Hasanzadeh, 2013, 43) Span of Control The span of control is another key element and the reason for this is that it determines the size of the organization. The size of the organization is not particularly in a physical manner but with regard to the amount of stuff that it bears. The span of control is used by the organization to understand the number of departments that it bears. This is important in the case of restructuring or even the planning of future changes in the organization (Cao, 2008, 3976). Centralization vs decentralization There are seven major comparable issues with regard to centralization and decentralization. In a more centralized company such as Body Shop, the environment is stable and thus conducive. The decentralized version of this is a complex non-understandable environment. The lower level managers are not able to make as efficiently decisions as the upper level managers make. A centralized version of this is lower level managers do not have the mandate to make suggestions on the various issues surrounding the organization. Decisions are even deemed significant in the centralized organization. The more centralized version is also very large as is in this case. Strategies are also implemented effectively in the company. Formalization This is where there is the understanding of equality in the organization. In Body Shop, there is the understanding of the standardization mark with regard to the manner in which people run the organization. In addition, there is the understanding of the level to which the rules and regulations of the organization guide the behavior of the employees. Body Shop organizational structure is well related to its organizational culture where as given in the structure, the power flows from top to bottom. In the case of organizational culture, it has always been the culture of the organization to ensure that the promotion process works and comes from within the organization. In Body Shop, the dominant culture is loyalty to the community. This culture means that during the hiring process, the organization gets many applications and employees from different areas including the locals. It is imperative to recognize that the management of the organization believes and appreciates in the loyalty of the customers and thus sets a certain percentage of all new recruits to come from the community around the organization. This is a fact that has seen the company grow in terms of customers. References Cao, M. 2008. Operations Management Perspective. International Journal of Production Research. 50 (14), p3974 – 3978. Daniels, D. 2014. The Body Shop. Retrieved http://www.thebodyshop.co.uk/index.aspx Hasanzadeh, M. 2013. Risk Assessment and Management. International Journal of Production Research. 45 (5), p 34 – 54. Jones, P. 2009. Strategic Organization. New York: McGraw Hill Publishers. Nicholas, B. 2012. Management Practices across Firms: Academy of Management Perspectives. 26 (1), p12-33. Read More