Organizational Structure Paper

Organizational Structure Paper

The company that I have chosen to write about is a mid-sized vegetable company. I worked for this company for three years and am well versed in the management structure that was in place while I worked there. I am going to compare the organizational structure of the vegetable company to a mid-sized meat processing company of which I personally knew all of the owners and to a large discount retail chain that I currently work for. I will show how two of these businesses have similar organizational structures and one is quite different.

I will describe how the organizational functions of HR, operations, finance, sales, and marketing effect the organization's structure. Each of these functions have specific needs that affect the organizations strategic plan, labor cost, efficiency, accuracy of information, the need for automated systems and profitability. Finally, I will explain how organizational design helps determine which structure best suits the organizational structure of the vegetable business that I chose to write about.

In the vegetable company, the structure was a bureaucratic structure. The company has been in business for over thirty years. The structure was a functional focused structure. The owner was the CEO of the company. He answered to a Board of Directors which was made up of the owner's brothers and one sister. The department heads reporting to the CEO were the Vice President of Sales and Marketing, the CFO, and the Vice President of Operations. This was a single production facility company but the production moved to southern Arizona during the winter where the vegetables are grown from October through March. The corporate office employees stayed at the office year round but the operations part of the business moved. Although this stressed the natural flow of communications and all business practices, it was a necessary part of the business since the entire industry moves south for the winter.

The meat processing company was also a bureaucratic organization with a functional focus. The structure was very similar to that of the vegetable company. The Board of Directors was made up of seven large cattle feeders that joined together to form a company and build a processing facility so that they had a local place to market their cattle. The Board of Director's hired a President to run the business. The President had a number of department heads reporting to him or her: the Vice President of Sales and Marketing, Vice President of Operations, and a Controller. The department heads managed their functional area of responsibility and reported to the President. The President managed the business and reported to the Board of Directors.

The large discount retail company is structured differently from the vegetable company or the meat processing company. The discount retailer also has a bureaucratic structure but the functional structure was different. The organization of Dollar Tree has seventeen executives which includes a CEO. The organization has District Mangers that reports to their Market Mangers so make sure that their district is meeting their sales expectation. The Store Managers is the leader who builds a team to make sure that his or her store is meeting their goals and increase their sales from last year's sales. The team is build with one freight manager, two operations manager, closing manager, and a part-time assistant manager. "The organization is listed in the Fortune 500 Company, operates at least four thousand stores across the United States, and it is supported by a nationwide logistic network. Dollar Tree operates as a multi-price variety chain and it is known as a discount store that sells every item for one dollar or less (ManagementParadise.com, 2011)."

The vegetable company is a functional structure as it is defined in our course reading suited as a producer of standardized goods and services at large volume and low cost. "Coordination and specialization of tasks are centralized in a functional structure, which makes producing a limited amount of products or services efficient and predictable