The Organisational Structure

Topic

The Organisational Structure

Instructions

SITUATION: 

 

You are the founder of a small but growing high-tech company that develops new computer software. With your current workload and new contracts in the pipeline, your business is thriving, except for one problem – you cannot find computer programmers for product development. Worse yet, current staff members are being lured away by other high-tech firms.

 

After suffering a particularly discouraging personnel raid in which competitors captured three of your most valued employees, you schedule a meeting with your director of human resources to plan organizational changes designed to encourage worker loyalty. You already pay your programmers high salaries relative to the competition, but the continuing exodus tells you that programmers are looking for something more.

 

ASSIGNMENT: 

Using Chapter 7 as a guide, write five paragraphs identifying some ways in which specific organizational changes might improve the working environment and encourage employee loyalty. As you analyze the following factors, ask yourself the obvious question, If I were a programmer, what organizational changes would encourage me to stay?

  1. Level of job specification: With many programmers describing their job as tedious because of the focus on detail in a narrow work area, what changes would you make in job specification? Right now, for instance, few of your programmers have any say in product design.
  1. Decision-making hierarchy: What decision-making authority would encourage people to stay? Is expanding employee authority likely to work better in a centralized or decentralized organization?
  2. Team authority: Can team empowerment make a difference? Taking the point of view of the worker, describe the ideal team.
  3. Intrapreneuring: What can your company do to encourage and reward innovation?
  4. Conclusion: As the company founder, how willing would you be to make major organizational changes in light of the shortage of qualified programmers? Which change(s) would be the most difficult?

Answer preview

In seeking to encourage employee loaylt and minimise the high turnover of the programmers, the organisations needs to consider clearly defining the roles of the individuals. The clear definition of roles will ensure that each person understands their responsibility and works towards becoming the best. An employee evaluation can be undertaken periodically, based on those responsibilities an individual has been assigned. This will eliminate the clash and people having to be assigned duties that are not within their scope of work.

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