Question

How do each of the traditional approaches to organizing (e.g., functional, different divisional structures, etc.) differ in what they allow a company to do well and in what challenges they provide for organizations?

How does the choice of organizational structure impact firm capabilities?

Given this, what differences might you expect in the structures of firms using different strategic approaches?

What about in their use of organizational controls and/or other organization processes?

What constraint(s) of traditional approaches to organizing are being addressed by new organizational approaches?

Why might this matter?

Answer 1

The traditional approaches to organizing are simple, functional, divisional structures. They provide the challenges and advantages to organizations.

Simple.

The first structure is simple wherein the owner of the company have most of the control over all the department of the company whether Human resource or Legal or finance etc. This structure helps in focused work and running of business with direct supervision of the owner and is suitable to business where it is at startup level or with lessor hierarchy and formalities.

Functional Approach

Functional structure is where the employees or staff are grouped together according to their specialization and similarity in the skills and service and similar work nature. This enables the company to execute its mission and goals effectively as the coordination works fine on ground and implementation of projects as the people grouped on basis of specialization would be able to work together and effectively. However responsibilities in case of crisis or mistakes cannot be fixed on any department that easily as the people across are grouped on similar specialization and based on their functional nature so hard to fix responsibility on any specific department.

Divisional structure.

When the the organizational structures are grouped on basis of the product line, market size, and on basis of geographies and service nature than it come under divisional structure.

Performance can be enhanced by adopting this strategy as the strategy would help the company to know which department is working good and which to make improvement in case of low performance. Also work can easily be divided and assigned based on the department.

Usually large corporation adopt this structure as it makes them easy to work and understand the each department in specific and fixing responsibilities.