Question

Diligent developers, a website design company in Bangalore is a startup initiative of Mr. Maniraj which aims at achieving a profit margin of 10% in its first year. Mr. Maniraj appointed Mr. Advait as the Digital marketing Head, Mr. Kiyansh as the head of Backend department and Mr. Nirved headed the Graphics Designing Department. Since each head was specialised in specific skills, it resulted in increased efficiency and better coordination. However, problems arose when Mr. Advait started considering group objectives superior to organisational objectives and stopped exchanging information with Mr. Kiyansh and Mr. Nirved. The company had to bear the brunt of lack of coordination and was unable to achieve its objectives.

1. Identify and state the organisational structure adopted by the company.
2. State two benefits and two limitations of the identified structure highlighted in the above case.

Answer 1

1. The organisational structure adopted by Diligent Developers is functional structure. Functional structure is an organisational design that groups similar or related jobs together.
2. • Benefits of functional structure:
     1. It leads to occupational specialization since emphasis is placed on specific functions.This promotes efficiency in utilization of manpower as employees perform similar tasks within a department and are able to improve performance.
     2. It promotes control and coordination within a department because of similarity in the tasks being performed.
   • Limitations of functional structure:
     1. A functional structure places less emphasis on overall enterprise objectives than the objectives pursued by a functional head. Such practices may lead to functional empires wherein the importance of a particular function may be overemphasised. Pursuing departmental interests at the cost of organisational interests can also hinder the interaction between two or more departments.
     2. It may lead to problems in coordination as information has to be exchanged across functionally differentiated departments.