Definition of Organizing

Organizing is the process of establishing orderly uses for all the organization’s resources.

Organizing is the act of rearranging elements following one or more rules.

A primary focus of organizing includes determining both what individual will do in an organization and how their individual efforts should best be combined to contribute to the attainment of the organizational objectives.

Guidelines for Organizing Resources by Henri Fayol

Henri Fayol developed sixteen general guidelines for organizing resources:

1. Judiciously prepare and execute the operating plan.
2. Organize the human and material components so that they are consistent with objectives, resources, and requirements of the concern.
3. Establish a single, competent, energetic, guiding authority (formal management structure)
4. Coordinate all activities and efforts.
5. Formulate clear, distinct, and precise decisions.
6. Arrange for efficient selection so that each department is headed by a competent, energetic manager and each employee is placed where she or he can render the greatest service.
7. Define duties.
8. Encourage initiative and responsibility.
9. Offer fair and suitable rewards for services rendered.
10. Make use of sanctions against faults and errors.
11. Maintain discipline.
12. Ensure that individual interests are consistent with the general interest of the organization.
13. Recognize the unity of command.
14. Promote both material and human coordination.
15. Institute and effect controls.
16. Avoid regulations, red tape, and paperwork.

The Importance of Organizing

• The organizing function is extremely important to the management system, because it is the primary mechanism with which managers activate plans. Because of managers are responsible for arranging work to accomplish the organization project. Organizing is defined as the process of create an organization structure. This function includes determine what tasks are to be done, who is to do them, or how the tasks are to be made.
• Organizing creates and maintains relationships between all organizational resources by indicating which resources are to be used for specified activities and when, where, and how they are to be used.
• Organizing is important to make classifies authority. It means that every employee must know who should they want to listen or who is above and below in department. It is because it can make their position clearly and avoid conflict. Then, everyone should principle of one boss at a time. If not, they will undermine authority. For example, manager and superior.
• A thorough  organizing efforts helps managers to minimize costly weaknesses, such as duplication of effort and idle organizational resources.

The Organizing Process:

5 steps of Organizing process

1. Reflect on Plans and Objectives: You need to reflect on your plans and objectives to identify your activities. Number of activities depends upon the objectives of the organization. And it should be done effectively because of no significant work is omitted or repeated.
2. Establish major Tasks: Then you need to identify what is working and what is not working. And you need to establish the working major tasks.
3. Divide major tasks into sub-tasks: When I assign a task to someone, many times that task needs to be broken down further, and some of those subtasks need to be assigned to some other members in the company. So I think having an ability to create subtasks very will be very useful. Especially, when the number of project team members exceeds 20 to 30, dividing and delegating tasks become very important. Having a single depth of tasks isn’t going to cut it in the cases where many team members with different ranks in the company hierarchy are working together.
4. Allocate resources and directives for sub-tasks: When using MIMD (multiple instruction, multiple data) parallel computers, one is often confronted with solving a task composed of many independent subtasks where it is necessary to synchronize the processors after all the subtasks have been completed. This paper studies how the subtasks should be allocated to the processors in order to minimize the expected time it takes to finish all the subtasks (sometimes called the makespan)
5. Evaluate the results of implemented organizing strategy: How is your system working for you – are you able to work your system? What needs to be modified? A good system should be easy to maintain.

Organizing Subsystem

Inputs
A portion of the organization’s:

1. People
2. Money
3. Raw materials
4. Machines

Process (Organizing Process)

1. Reflecting on plans and objectives
2. Establishing major tasks
3. Dividing major tasks into sub-tasks
4. Allocating resources and directives for sub-tasks
5. Evaluating results of organizing strategy

Outputs

Organization

Classical Organizing Theory

• Represents the cumulative insights of early management writers on how organizational resources can best be used to enhance  goal attainment.
• According to Max Weber, the main components of an organizing effort include detailed procedures and rules, a clearly outlined organizational hierarchy, and mainly impersonal relationships between organization members.
• Bureaucracy is the term referring to this management system.

Main considerations of classical organizing theory

1. Structure
2. Division of labour
3. Span of management
4. Scalar relationships

Structure:

• Refers to designated relationships among resources of the management system.
• Structure seeks to facilitate resource use, both individually and collectively, as the management system seeks to attain its objectives.
• The organization chart is a graphic representation of organizational structure.

Authority and Responsibility

The location of a person’s position on the organization chart emphasizes his/her authority and responsibility. The farther away the position from the top the less authority and responsibility that person possesses.

Structure and Gender

Organizational structure tends to be hierarchical in nature.  Women are not comfortable with this structure, and they tend to create webs of authority to better fit their relational type leadership styles.

Formal and Informal Structure

• Formal structure shows the relationships among organizational resources as outlined by management.
• Informal structure shows the patterns of relationships that develop because of the informal activities of organization members.

Departmentalization and Formal Structure:

A Contingency Viewpoint

• A department is a unique group of resources established by management to perform some  organizational task.
• Departmentalization is the process of establishing departments in the management system.
• Department creation is typically based on the:

1. Work functions being performed
2. Product being assembled, territory being covered
3. Target customer
4. Process designed to manufacture the product

Forces Influencing Formal Structure

Shetty and Carlisle focus on four primary forces:

• Forces in the manager
• Forces in the task
• Forces in the environment
• Forces in the subordinates

Division of labor

Division of labor is the assignment of various portions of a particular task among a number of organizational members.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Division of Labor

• Since workers specialize in a particular task, their task performance skills tend to increase.
• Workers do not lose valuable time in moving from one task to another.
• Because workers concentrate on performing only one job, they naturally try to make their job easier and more efficient.
• Division of labor creates a situation where workers only need to know how to perform their part of the work task, rather than the process for the entire product.

Division of Labor and Coordination

Coordination is the orderly arrangement of group effort to provide unity of action in the pursuit of a common purpose.

Follett’s Guidelines on Coordination

• Provide direct horizontal relationships and personal communications.
• Coordination should be a discussion topic throughout the planning process.
• Maintaining coordination is a continuing process and should be treated as such.
• The importance of the human element and the communication process should be considered in any attempt to encourage coordination.

Span of Management

Span of management refers to the number of individuals a manager supervises.

Designing Span of Management:

A Contingency Viewpoint

According to Koontz, several factors influence the appropriateness of the size of an individual’s span of management:

• Similarity of functions
• Geographic contiguity
• Complexity of functions
• Coordination
• Planning

Graicunas’ Formula

Graicunas’ formula is a formula that makes the span-of-management point that as the number of a manager’s subordinates increases arithmetically, the number of possible relation- ships among the manager and the subordinates increases geometrically.

Scalar Relationships

• Scalar relationships refer to the chain of command positioning of individuals on an organization chart.
• Unity of command is a management principle stating that an individual should have only one boss.
• A gangplank refers to a “bridge”, or communication channel from one organizational division to another but not shown in the formal organizational chart. It eliminates time and expense in contacting people necessary for information.