Research Paper for a Small Firm

Abstract

I have prepared a research paper for a small firm that hired my company to help with strategic plans for global expansion. There has been a lot of growth in the business over the past 10 years but the company needs help restructuring the organization and creating different levels of management. This paper discusses my recommendations on how the organizational structure should be made and explores the important benefits of having a proper structure in place.

Organizational Structure

There may be challenges affiliated with reorganizing a company's corporate structure. Factors that need to be considered include budget, performance, company culture, morale and the reaction of employees. However, creating a hierarchy in a business can be beneficial to a company.

Corporations that are large in size tend to have a strategic management structure that consists of an upper management team that creates corporate values, mission, culture, goals and strategic vision. Underneath the upper management team there is usually a lower management team that focuses on functional business units. Each functional business unit performs independently to meet their corporate objective. The strategic business unit is usually responsible for tracking and creating its budget, making product decisions, hiring, and price setting. The business unit will develop its business strategy to be aligned with corporate expectations and standards.

When a business is considering expanding its operations to a global market base, having different levels of management and decentralizing the company would be a good idea. The benefit of having a decentralized operation will enable the local team to be experts on the consumer base for their particular market, allow for senior management to make more important decisions, ease expansion, and make more efficient decision making (Joseph 2013). It is also beneficial because having a decentralized team where there are several department managers can help get over the hurdle of cultural norms if the management in place is familiar with cultural practices.

A hierarchy needs to be created within the organization that will be compromised of Senior Management, Departmental Management, and Management. In this hierarchy, every level of employees has managers that directly supervise their level of workers and report to upper-level management above them that will create the hierarchy in the form of a pyramid which will connect and contribute to organizational goals (Vogt 2013). Depending on the different levels of managers, this hierarchy will be tall or flat on the pyramid and the final decision regarding