Organization & Teamwork

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Danny Laker-Senadheera M.A.

ORGANIZATION & TEAMWORK Danny Laker-Senadheera M.A. HS-Fresenius / Winter 2014/15

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Project Work • Establish a new Business of a traditional company outside

of Europe: • Discuss, which is the best decision for your own goals and

for the company’s overall goals? • Human Resources à motivate & develop the staff; recruit

the right staff • Accounting à keep the numbers down • Sales à develop a strategy • Operations à organize the logistics and planning from

design/production/new market

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Your Opinion • What do you think is the most important character trait or

ability a person should have in the respective field. Discuss with your partner and compare your results afterwards

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7 Principles of Professionalism • Striving to excel • Being dependable & accountable • Being a team player • Communicating effectively • Making ethical decisions • Demonstrating a sense of etiquette • Maintaining a positive outlook

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Achieving Professionalism • What is Professionalism? • Professionalism à The quality of performing at a high

level and conducting oneself with purpose and pride! • 

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Elements of Professionalism

Be the best Pros strive to excel, to be the best they can be at everything they do.

Excelling at every level is how you build a great career.

Be dependable Pros keep their promises and meet their commitments

Pros learn from their mistakes and take responsibility for their errors

Be a team player Pros know how to contribute to a larger cause.

Team players make others around them better.

Be clear Communication is the single most important skill you can develop.

Learn to listen as well as you speak and write.

Be respectful Good business etiquette is a sign of respect for those around you.

Respecting others is not only good, it’s good for your career.

Be ethical Responsible professionals work to avoid ethical lapses.

Pros weigh their options carefully when facing ethical dilemmas.

Be positive successful people believe in what they’re doing and in themselves.

Pros don’t complain about problems; the yfind them and fix them.

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Communicating Effectively

Listen actively • Making a conscious effort to turn off your own filters and biases to truly hear and understand what someone is saying

Provide practical information • Give people useful information that is adapted to their specific needs

Give facts rather than vague impressions • Be specific and use concrete language supporting your argument

Don’t present opinions as facts. • Offer opinions, and make sure your audience understands it

Present information in a concise, efficient manner. • Audiences appreciate and respond more positively to high-efficiency messages

Clarify responsibilities. • Clearly state what actions need to be taken either in oral or written communication

Offer compelling persuasive arguments and recommendation. • Make it clear to people how they will benefit from responding to your message the way you want them to.

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ORGANIZATION & TEAMWORK Danny Laker-Senadheera M.A. HS-Fresenius / Winter 2014/15

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1.  Designing an Effective Organization Structure

2.  Organizing in Teams

3.  Organization structures

4.  Team productivity

5.  Unstructured organization

Agenda

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●  Affects the way of making decisions, communicate and accomplish important tasks

●  Good organization structure helps to achieve the goals

●  Formal organization: ●  Lines of Communication and authority flow ●  The way to accomplish tasks

●  Informal organization: ●  Network of interactions between employees ●  Interactions transcend formal boundaries and organizational barriers

●  Companies also prefer an agile organization to guarantee a quick workflow ●  Choosing the right structure to maximize effectiveness and efficency

1. Designing an Effective Organization Structure

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●  Identifying the business functions they should focus on

● Core competencies -> Activities that a company considers central and vital to it‘s business

● Outsourcing parts or processes of work to get a higher effectivity

Identifying core competencies

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•  Work specialization of overall work tasks -> Divison of Labor

•  Organizational Tasks are broken down into seperate Jobs

•  Tasks are well defined and require specific skills

Identifying Job Responsibilities

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●  Lines of authority that connects the various groups and levels

●  Flow of authority from managment level to the next ●  Who is responsible for each task? ●  Who has the authority to make a decision

●  Employees have a certain amount of responsibility

●  Line organization ●  Clear line of authority flow from the top down

●  Line and Staff organization ●  Has a clear chain of command ●  Includes functional groups of people

Defining the Chain of Command

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● Number of people under one manager‘s control -> Span of Control

● Flat Organization: ● Wide span of management ● A large number of people reporting directly to each manager

● Tall Organization: ● Many hierarchical levels ● Fewer people reporting to each manager

● Reducing time for decisions by Pushing authority to lower levels

Span of Management

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● Centralization - the concentration of deciscion-making authority at the top of an organization

●  Decentralization -Deligation of decision-making authority to employees in lower level positions

Centralization Versus Decentralization

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● Vertically organized companies may become slow to react

● Many business tasks demand the expertise of people isolated by the chain of command

● Using a variety in the decision-making process to combat these issues ●  Involving employees from all levels and functions

2. Organizing in Teams

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● A unit of two or more poeple who work together to achieve a shared goal

● Members of a team:

●  Sharing a Mission

●  Are collectively responsible for their work

● A Team can accomplish more together than they could individually

-> „Synergy“

● Goals may set by either the team itself or someone in the formal chain of command

●  Team Leaders are often appointed by senior managers

What is a Team?

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Types of Teams

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● Assembled to find ways of improving quality, efficency or other perfomance measures

● Can attack a specific problem and disbands after presenting or implementing the solution

● Can continue to meet over time, evaluating trends, and fixing new problems as they crop up

Problem-Solving Team:

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● Manages its own activities and requires minimal supervisions

●  controls the pace of work and determination of work assignments

● Selects their own members

● Represents a significant change for organizations in command and control structures

● Advantages like lower costs, faster decision making, greater flexibility , improved quality

Self-Managed Team...:

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●  Organized along the lines of the organization‘s vertical structure

●  Draws together employees from various functional areas and expertise

●  Facilitate information exchange, help coordiante multiple organizational units...

●  Can causse Conflicts with an individual‘s regular departmental workload

●  Often involve some form of a matrix structure

Functional Team/Cross Functional Teams:

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● Composed of members at two ore more geographic locations

● Can be as effective as face-to-face teams

Virtual Team:

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● Taking advantage of versatile opinions, experiences and skills of members

● Applying/Seizing technology to replicate resources that in-person teams rely on

● Should take extra care to keep the team effectively

Three Important Rules:

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● Erasing the constraints of geographic and organization boundaries ● Helping people coordinate their efforts in pursuit of a shared goal

● Collaboration and identifying of the best people on problems, or projects

● Has become a an essential tool for many teams, matrix organizations, temporary organizations and other structures

Social Networks and Virtual Communities

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● Departmentalization: grouping people within an organization into logical groups (for example according to function, division or network)

●  vertical structure : how many layers the chain of commmand includes

● horizontal structure: how the business functions/ work specialties are divided across the company

● Endless variations of horizontal and vertical structures are possible

3. Organizing the workforce

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● Grouping employees according to their skills, resource use and expertise

Advantages of splitting the organization: ● Efficient use of resources and encourages the development of in depth

skills ● Unified decision making by top managment ● Enhance communication and coordinating of acitivities within

departments

Problems:

● Employees may just focus on departmental goals ● Can create problems with communication, coordination and controll

Functional structures

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Agile Organization

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Functional Organization

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● Pro ● Specialists with similar skills

● Top-Down-Management

●  Internal Communication among immediate colleagues

● Con ● Development of silos ●  Geeks

● Solution: Cross-Functional-Teams

Functional Organization

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●  Product divisions

à Groupings around of each of the company´s product

●  Process divisions

à based on the major steps of a production process

●  Customer divisions

à satisfying specific groups of customers

●  Geographic divisons

à Respond to local customs, styles and product preferences

Grouping departments according to similarities in:

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Product Division

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● Pro: ● React quickly to change (more flexibility),

● can often provide better services (specialization)

● Contra: ● may neglect the overall goals of an organization,

● compete with other divisions for customers or

Product Division

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Customer Divisions

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● Pro ● Self-contained

● Short ways to act à flexibility

● Con ● Expensive à duplication of departments

● Divisional goals vs. organizational goals

● Strong competition between different divisions

Geographical Divsion

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Matrix Structure

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● Pro ● Pool & share resources

● Project oriented

● Con ● Reporting to two bosses

● More communication & coordination

● Bigger challenges for managers à hands-on

Matrix Structure

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● Ensure that teams are more diverse ● Create enterprise-level training programs

● Implement rational assignments

● Facilitate different leadership styles

● Identify competencies & correct if needed

● Don’t try to use hierarchy to solve an issue

● Resist escalation

● Handle emotionally charged communication: face-to-face

Ruth Malloy HBR ‘Managing Effectively in a Matrix’

Successful in Matrix Structures

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● Structure in which usually more than one company works together to produce a good or service

● Perform selected tasks for a headquarters organization (virtual organization)

● Outsourcing functions and focus on core competencies

Networking Structures

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Pro:

●  lower costs,

● more felxibility (reacting more quickly to market demands),

● boost of competiveness

●  knowledge & skills

Contra:

● Relying on outsiders

● Vulnerability

●  Immediate competition with suppliers

Networking Structures

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ADVANTAGES DISADVANTAGES

Higher quality decisions Inefficiency

Increased diversity of views Groupthink

Increased commitment to solutions and changes

Diminished individual motivation

Lower levels of stress and destructive internal competition

Structural disruption

Improved flexibility and responsiveness

Excessive workloads

4. Working in Teams

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Is supporting a group decision you don‘t completely agree with always a case of

groupthink?

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What makes an effective Team?

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(1)  Right size of the team

(2)  Right mix of people

(3)  Clear sense of purpose

(4)  Open and honest communication

(5)  Creative thinking

CHARACTERISTICS OF EFFECTIVE TEAMS

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TEAM MEMBER ROLES

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(1)  Make effective teamwork a top management priority

(2)  Select team members wisely

(3)  Build a sense of fairness in decision making

(4)  Manage conflicts constructively

(5)  Stay on track

5 STEPS FOR EFFECTICTIVE TEAMS

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(1)  Forming

(2)  Storming

(3)  Norming

(4)  Performing

(5)  Adjourning

Ø  Development of cohesiveness

Ø  Emergence of norms

TEAM DEVELOPMENT

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What are the risks of not giving new teams the time and opportunity to „storm“ and „norm“ before

tackling the work they‘ve been assigned?

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Disagreement over responsibilities

Poor communication

Withholding of information

Basic differences

Power struggles

Different goals

TEAM CONFLICT CAUSES

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Proactive attention

Communication

Openness

Research

Flexibility

Fair play

Alliance

TEAM CONFLICT SOLUTIONS

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Establish clear goals

Well-defined tasks

Facilitating open communication

TEAM CONFLICT PREVENTION

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Have you ever had to adapt your personality in order to suceed on a particular team?

Was this a positive or negative experience?

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● Best way to organize might be with little or no structure at all

● „Formless Form“ enabled by: ● Cloud computing

● Mobile communication

● Online collaboration platforms

● All manners of social Networking tools

5. Managing an Unstructured Organization

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What exactly is an unstructured organization?

● Unstructured organization: ● No conventional structure

● Assembles talent as needed from the open market

Ø Virtual and networked organizational concepts taken to the extreme

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● Solo entrepreneur can now quickly assemble a product development team to design a new product and then …

● … disassemble that team and build a manufacturing team

● … afterwards assemble a sales and customer support team to get the product on the market

-> Without hiring a single employee <-

Example

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● Membership of more then 300.000 computer scientists and software engineers

● „TopCoder“ members compete to come up with the best solutions

● Entrepreneur can get the very best of each part of the design

Company „TopCoder“

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● Lower fixed costs and more flexible capacity management:

● Hiring employees increases the fixed costs

● Much more flexibility in adjusting their expense level to match revenue level

● Increased agility: ● Virtual organizations can be assembled/disassembled,

reconfigured much faster than a conventional employee based organization

Benefits for Companies

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● Access to otherwise unreachable talent: ● Managers can „rent“ top talent that is too expensive to hire

full time or unwilling to work full time

● Benefits of competition: ● Firms can stage competitions in talent markets to see who

can devise the best solutions to problems

Benefits for Companies

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● Complexity and Control issues: ● Less control about their „talents“

● Workers have to report to multiple bosses

● Uncertainty: ● Without staff at the ready, companies wont know if they‘ll get the

talents they need

● Management succession: ● No groom of future Managers -> Companies could be hard

pressed to replace upper manager when the time comes

Challenges for Companies

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● Performance-based evaluation: ● The only thing that matters is getting the job done

● Freedom and flexibility: ● Workers have more leeway in choosing which projects they want

and how much they want to work

● Access to more interesting and more fulfilling work: ● Workers can get access to opportunities that might be

unreachable otherwise

Benefits for Workers

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● Uncertainty: ● Workers can‘t ne sure they‘ll have work from one project to the

next

● Loss of meaning and connection: ● No sense of „working together“

● Career development: ● Workers are left to fend for themselves and to keep their skills

current at their own expense

Challenges for Workers

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People have to be motived according to their understanding of the job…

Documents

Organization & Teamwork