A flawed organizational design

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 842.

Today's big companies do very little to enhance the productivity of their professionals. In fact, their vertically oriented organizational structures, retrofitted with ad hoc and matrix overlays, nearly always make professional work more complex and inefficient. These vertical structures — relics of the industrial age — are singularly ill suited to the professional work process. Professionals cooperate horizontally with one another throughout a company, yet vertical structures force such men and women to search across poorly connected organizational silos to find knowledge and collaborators and to gain their cooperation once they have been found.

Worse yet, matrix structures, designed to accommodate the "secondary" management axes that cut across vertical silos, frequently burden professionals with two bosses — one responsible for the sales force, say, and another for a product line. Professionals seeking to collaborate thus need to go up the organization before they can go across it. Effective collaboration often takes place only when the would-be collaborators enlist hierarchical line managers to resolve conflicts between competing organizational silos. Much time is lost reconciling divergent agendas and finding common solutions.

Other ad hoc organizational devices, such as internal joint ventures, co-heads of units, and proliferating task forces and study groups, serve only to complicate the organization further and to increase the amount of time required to coordinate work internally. The result is endless meetings, phone calls, and e-mail exchanges as talented professionals — line managers or members of shared utilities — waste valuable time grappling with the complexity of a deeply flawed organizational structure.