Organisation's Structure, Learning, and Design Practice (Essay Sample)

Organisation's Structure, Learning, and Design Practice
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Organisation's Structure, Learning, and Design Practice
Introduction
The business environment has never been as competitive as it is today, with organisations virtually competing in every aspect thus changing the paradigms of their operation. This level of competition is increasingly becoming transformative as it requires organisations to align their business strategies with their structure, learning process, and design practices to maintain a competitive edge in the market. While organisational structure establishes the mechanism of authority and flow of information in the organisation, learning is the process by which the employees understand the objectives and goals of the organisation through the available channels of information flow (Barrick, Thurgood, Smith & Courtright, 2015).
On the other hand, the design practice is the way of responding to situations by continuously monitoring performance. The effective integration of these organisational facets helps improve the performance of the organisation which then gives it a competitive edge. The purpose of this paper is to make practical and actionable recommendations on how to improve the performance of the organisation through structure, learning, and organisation design practices.
Recommendations
Due to the changes in the today's business environment, the design efforts of the organisation should be guided by the principles of flexibility and responsiveness. As a matter of fact, a successful design promotes decision-making and reporting structures, incentives, and workflows that offer the best support to the unique product lines and strategic mission of the organisation (Camison & Villar-Lopez, 2014). Consequently, this helps the company to adapt quickly to the changes in its area of operation. As such, the organisation should avoid adopting design practices that are based on managerial whimsy; rather they should be guided by the requisite care being on necessity.
Structure
COWI Company's business strategy is driven by the need to expand its market and to develop a new line of products. Since the core competencies of the company are based on its ability to serve its markets with high-quality products, a broad range of products, which are affordable and accessible for many sites. Additionally, the company embraces ethical practices in its business operations which also incorporate a friendly encounter with the market. It is acclaimed that the company gets its competitive advantage from its ambience, quality, service, and culture (Fraj, Matute & Melero, 2015). To keep up with the pace of business transformative ability, the company has to adopt a bureaucratic structure of management in which it would have the power to manage every aspect of its business to ensure that it effectively supports its competitive advantage aspects.
Bureaucracy as an organisational structure is based on the routinely high operating tasks of the organisation which are achieved through the grouping of tasks into functional departments, formalised sets of rules and regulations, and specialisation. Also, there is a chain of command which should be followed during the decision-making process as there are narrow spans of control and authority is centralised. Authority and decisions are made at the top by the top management and are communicated downwards to the department-level employees who implement the in work (Erçetin & Banerjee, 2015). Since the competitive advantage of COWI is based on the standardisation of its business practices through ambience, quality, service, and culture, bureaucracy is the most effective as it would enhance control towards the same objective.
However, considering the business culture which involves grass root friendly services, the bureaucratic structure would rob the company attachment to the employees who are expected to translate the culture of service to the grass root. In this regard, COWI should adopt adhocracy structure. This structure is highly responsive to the market demands and is, therefore, flexible to help the company adapt easily to the rapid changing and complex business environment (Casey, 2005). Adhocracy is based on the principles of the organic model of an organisation which embraces mutual adjustments to enhance the organisational coordination.
Adhocracy is also characterised by integrative structures and roles, liaisons, and cross-functional grouping. As such, the company should adopt adhocracy structure which is highly responsive to the customer and quick to new products to the market. It also improves learning as it is highly flexible thus promoting continuous learning of new skills by the employees. This promotes the performance of the organisation as employees can effectively learn multiple skills and roles which they can apply in the dynamic environment of job shift (Galbraith, 2014). On the other hand, this structure pr...