Test Your Knowledge of Organisation Structure Basics

Introduction to Organisation Structure

• Ryanair is Europe's largest airline and has achieved remarkable success in a highly competitive industry.
• Organisation structure describes how work is divided, supervised, and coordinated.
• Organisation charts are often used to represent the main departments and work positions in an organisation and their reporting relationships.
• Formal structure is the official structure of the organisation, while informal structure refers to the unofficial working relationships between organisational members.
• The basic elements of structure are work specialisation, chain of command, span of control, centralisation vs decentralisation, and departmentalisation.
• Work specialisation involves breaking down a job into steps completed by different individuals with different skills.
• Negative results of work specialisation include difficulty in replacing employees, boredom leading to low productivity, poor quality, and high employee turnover, and lack of motivation.
• Chain of command refers to the continuous chain of authority clarifying who reports to whom, with concepts related to it including authority, responsibility, accountability, and delegation.
• Span of control is the number of subordinates directly reporting to a manager, and the right number must be found for effective and efficient management.
• Centralised organisations make decisions at the centre, while decentralised organisations push decisions down to the level closest to the problem.
• Departmentalisation refers to grouping the organisation's activities into units with a manager in charge of each unit.
• Mechanistic structures are rigid, stable, high in specialisation, centralisation, and formalisation, while organic structures are flexible, adaptive, encourage cross-functional teamwork and horizontal communication, and are best for complex and unique tasks.