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Organization Structure and Stress Management

Organisation Structure

An organization structure defines how job tasks are formally divided, grouped and coordinated. There are six elements that mangers need to address when they design their organization’s structure. These are:
• Work specialization
• Departmentalization
• Chain of command
• Span of control
• Centralisation & Decentralization
• Formalisation

Work Specialization:- refers to the degree to which tasks in the organization are subdivided into separate jobs. The essence of work specialization is that, rather than an entire job being done by one individual, it is broken down into a number of steps, with each step being completed by a separate individual.

Departmentalisation:- Once the jobs have been divided through work specialization, these jobs have to be grouped together so that common tasks can be coordinated. The basis by which jobs are grouped together is called departmentalization.
The activities can be grouped by functions performed. A Manufacturing manager might organize his plant by separating engineering, accounting, manufacturing, personnel and supply specialists into common departments. Functional departmentalization seeks to achieve economics of scale by placing people with common skills and orientations into common units.
Tasks can also be departmentalized by the type of product the organization produces. Each major product is placed under the authority of an executive who has complete global responsibility for that product. The major advantage of this type of grouping is increased accountability for product performance, since all the activities related to a product are under the direction of a single manager.
Another way to departmentalize is on the basis of geography or territory. The sales function, for instance, may have western, southern, eastern region. Each of these regions is in effect, a department organized around geography. If an organisation’s customers are scattered over a large geographic area and have similar needs based on their location, then this form of departmentalization.
A final category of departmentalization is to use the particular type of customer. An organization can organize itself around customer groups like corporates, retail, government etc.

Chain of Command is an unbroken line of authority that extends from the top of the organization to the lowest level and clarifies who reports to whom. It answers questions for employees such as” To whom do I go if I have a problem?” and ‘ To whom am I responsible?”
The unity of command principle helps preserve the concept of an unbroken line of authority. It states that a person should have one and only one superior to whom he or she is directly responsible. If the unity of command is broken, an employee might have to cope with conflicting demands or priorities from several superiors.

Span of control refers to the number of subordinates a manager can efficiently and effectively direct. Span of control is important because, to a large degree, it determines the number of levels and managers and organization has all things being equal the wider or larger the span, the more efficient the organization. Narrow span has three major drawbacks. First, they are expensive because they add to the levels of management. Second, they make vertical communication in the organization more complex. The added levels of hierarchy slow down decision making and tend to isolate upper management. Third, narrow spans of control encourage overly tight supervision and discourage autonomy.

Centralisation and Decentralisation:- Centralisation refers to the degree to which decision making is concentrated at a single point in the organization. The concept includes only formal authority that is, the rights inherent to one’s position. Typically, it’s said that if top management makes the organisation’s key decision with little or no input from lower-level personnel, then the organization is centralized. In contrast, the actually given the discretion to make decision, the more decentralisation there is.
An organization characterized by centralization is an Inherently different structural entity from one that is an inherently different structural entity from one that is decentralized. In a decentralized organization, action can be taken more quickly to solve problem, more people provide input into decisions and employees are less likely to feel alienated from those who make the decisions that effect their work lives.
Consistent with recent management efforts to make organization more flexible and responsive, there has been a marked trend toward decentralizing decision making. In large companies, lower-level managers are closer to “the action” and typically have more detailed knowledge about problems than do top management.

Formalisation refers to the degree to which job within the organization are standardized. If a job is highly formalized then the job incumbent has a minimum amount of discretion
Over what is to be done, when it is to be done and how it is to be done. Employees can be expected always to handle the same input in exactly same way, resulting in a consistent and uniform output. There are explicitly job description lots of organizational rules, and dearly defined procedures covering work processes in organizations in which thee is high formalization. Where formalization is low, job behaviors are relatively non-programmed and employees have a great deal of freedom to exercise discretion in their work. Because an individual’s discretion on the job is inversely related to the amount of behavior in that job that is preprogrammed by the organization, the greater the standardization and the less input the employee has into how his or her work is to be done. Standardization not his/her work is to be done. Standardization not only eliminates the possibility of employees engaging in alternative behaviors, but it even removes the need for employees to consider alternatives.

Common organizational Designs
There are three common organizational designs- Simple structure, bureaucracy and the matrix structure.

Simple Structure:- Simple structure is characterized by a low degree of departmentalization, wide span of control, authority centralized in a single person and little formalization. The simple structure is a “felt ” organization, it usually has only two or three vertical levels, a lower body of employees and one individual in whom the decision making authority is centralized. The simple structure is most widely practiced in small businesses in which the manager and the owner are one and the same. The strength of the simple structure less in its simplicity. It’s fast flexible and inexpensive to maintain and accountability is dear.

Bureaucracy:- The key concept that underlies all bureaucracy is standardization. It is a structure with highly routine operating tasks achieved through specialization very formalized rules and regulations, tasks that are grouped into functional departments, centralized authority, narrow span of control and decision making the chain of command.
The primary strength of bureaucracy lies in its ability to perform standardized activities in a highly efficient manner. Putting like specialties together in functional departments results in economics of scale, minimum duplications of personal and equipment. Furthermore bureaucracy gives opportunity to less talented and hence less costly middle and lower level managers. The pervasiveness of rules and regulations substitutes for managerial discretion. Standardized operations, coupled with high formalization allow decision making to be centralized. There is little need therefore for innovative and experienced decision makers below the level of senior executives.

Matrix Structure:- Matrix structure creates dual line of authority and combines functional and product departmentalization .
The strength of functional departmentalization lies in putting like specialists together, which minimizes the number necessary while allowing the pooling and sharing of specialized resources across products. Its major disadvantage is the difficulty of coordinating the tasks of diverse functional specialists so that their activities are completed on time and within budget. Product departmentation, on the other hand, has exactly the opposite benefits and disadvantages. It facilitates coordination among specialties to achieve on-time completion and meet budgets targets. Further more, it provides clear responsibility for all activities related to a product, but with duplication of activities and costs. The matrix attempts to gain the strength of each, while avoiding their weaknesses.
The most obvious structural characteristics of the matrix is that it breaks the unity of command concept. Employees in the matrix have two bosses-their functional department managers and their product managers. Therefore, the matrix has a dual chain of command.
The strength of the matrix lies in its ability to facilitate coordination when the organization has a multiplicity of complex and interdependent activities. As an organization gets larger, its information processing capacity can become overloaded. In a bureaucracy, complexity results in increased formularization. The direct and frequent contact between different specialists in the matrix can make for better communication and more quickly reaches the people who need to take account of it.

Stress Management

Stress is the “wear and tear” our bodies experience as we adjust to our continually changing environment; it has physical and emotional effects on us and can create positive or negative feelings. As a positive influence, stress can help compel us to action; it can result in a new awareness and an exciting new perspective. As a negative influence, it can result in feelings of distrust, rejection, anger, and depression, which in turn can lead to health problems such as headaches, upset stomach, rashes, insomnia, ulcers, high blood pressure, heart disease, and stroke. With the death of a loved one, the birth of a child, a job promotion, or a new relationship, we experience stress as we readjust our lives. In so adjusting to different circumstances, stress will help or hinder us depending on how we react to it.

Factor causing Stress
Three sets of factor
• Environmental
• Organizational
• Individual
That act as potential cause of stress. Whether they become actual stress depends on individual differences such as job experience and personality when stress is experienced an individual, its symptoms can surface as physiological, psychological and behavioral outcomes.

Environmental factors– just as environmental uncertainty influences the design of an organization’s structure, it also changes in the business cycle create economic uncertainties. When company B is contractive, for example, people become increasingly anxious about their job security. Similarly political instability is a cause of stress. Political crisis like civil war, riots, hostilities with neighboring countries etc can lead to stress. Technology uncertainties are a third type of environmental factor that can cause stress. New innovations can make employee’s skills and experience obsolete in a very short time, computers, robotics, automation and similar forms of technology innovations are a threat to many people and cause them stress.

Organizational factors– Organizational factors that cause stress include task, role, and Interpersonal demands, organizational structure and organizational leadership. Task demands are factors related to a person’s job. They include the design of individual’s job (autonomy task variety, degree of automation), working conditions and physical work layout.
Role demands relate to pressures placed on a person as a function of the particular role he or she plays in the organization. Role conflicts create expectations that may be hard to reconcile or satisfy. Role overload is experienced when the employee is expected to do more than time permits.
Interpersonal demands are pressures created by other employees, lack of social support from colleagues and poor interpersonal relationships can cause considerable stress, especially among employees with a high social needs.
Organizational structure defines the level of differentiation in the organization, the degree of rules and regulation and where decisions are made. Excessive rules and lack of participation in decisions that might be potential is sources of stress.
Organizational leadership represents the managerial style of the organization’s senior managers. One chief executive officer creates a cultural characterized by tension, fear and anxiety. They establish unrealistic pressures to perform in the short run, impose excessively tight controls, and routinely fire employees for poor – performance.

Individual factors- Primarily, these factors are family issues, personal economic problems and inherent personality characteristics. People hold family and personal relationships dear. Marital difficulties, the breaking off of a relationship and discipline troubles with children are examples of relationship problems that create stress for employees. Economic problems created by individuals overextending their financial resources is another set of personal troubles that can create stress for employees and distract their attention from their work. Some people may have an inherent tendency to accentuate negative aspect of the world in general i.e. stress symptoms expressed on the job may actually originate in the person’s personality.

Stress can be removed by the following method:

Strength: Physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual. Physical and emotional weakness leads to irritability. A strong, healthy body developed through proper diet, exercise and pranayama techniques helps reduce stress at the physical level. Through satsang and appropriate learning gained therein, the mind can be strengthened. Love, compassion and friendship are valuable strength-givers that help us cope with stress.
The scriptures say that knowledge of the Self cannot be gained without inner strength. Rabindranath Tagore, in a poem, prays to the Lord not to remove all obstacles, but instead, he asks for strength to bear them. Before the start of the Mahabharata war Arjun was seized with a bout of emotional weakness and he refused to fight the war. Lord Krishna rescued him by giving him emotional strength.

Traffic control: We need to regulate and control our thoughts. We can cope with stress best if our thoughts are orderly and methodical. Unnecessary accumulation leads to clogging of the mind. The key lies in being able to live one moment at a time. Eat while eating, work while working, leave the home at home and the office in the office. Remember, however long we have to travel we can only take one step at a time. Worrying only reduces efficiency and then even simple tasks cannot be completed correctly and in time.

Re-design: We tend to view life and ourselves through our own philosophy. A readjustment or reorientation in this philosophy increases our capacity to bear heavier loads.

Erase the ego: The ego, anger, fear and jealousy are negative emotions that reduce efficiency, leading to mental weakness, causing stress. Too much emphasis on the ego, or abrogation of doer ship is responsible for increasing stress. Sri Rama asked Sri Hanuman how he was able to cause so much havoc in Lanka and yet return unscathed. Hanuman disclaimed all responsibility. He said, “I did not do it, you did it through me”. There is a higher power or strength working through us.

Sharing your feeling: Share your wealth, knowledge, workload or anything else you have. By and large people do not know how to share or delegate. Lord Vishnu as the manager of the world is the best example of delegation of work. Everything happens under his stewardship but he remains free and at-ease.

Surrender to the Lord: Free your mind from the weight of worries and become an instrument, adopting an attitude of service. This attitude will ensure efficiency, success, and freedom from stress.

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