Organizational Structure
ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE
LESSON OBJECTIVES:
By the end of this lesson, students should be able to:
Identify and describe the differences between direct and indirect authority.
List and describe how 10 of Deming’s 14 points of total quality management (TQM) can affect the organizational governance of public education.
INTRODUCTION
This chapter discusses the types of organizational structure found in most organizations. Components creating the basis of an organization’s structure are broken down into components of job specialization, departmentalization, chain of command, authority and responsibility, centralization/decentralization, line and staff authority, and span of management. The importance of this chapter is that one (i.e., a potential school administrator) must understand the design of the organization before he/she can successfully administer it.
Public education is entirely dependent on job specialization in that most parts of an educational system are separated into different groups or divisions, such as elementary – middle-secondary education, administrators – teachers, certified staff – classified staff, and so on. Systems not using job specialization tend to use such alternatives as job rotation, job enlargement, and job enrichment. Although our text suggests that job rotation is used in larger school districts, it is occasionally used in smaller systems. The idea behind job rotation in school administration is that every principal or school administrator has certain strengths and qualities that others may lack. By routinely transferring school principals after a predetermined time period, a school system can match a particular school’s need with an administrator who has expertise in that particular area. Job enlargement gives an employee the ability to develop additional capabilities and strengths by performing additional duties not originally assigned to him/her. Finally, job enrichment improves employees by allowing them the opportunity to make administrative decisions that are normally made at a higher level in the system. This in effect mirrors Maslow’s “self-actualization” or Ouchi’s ownership theory discussed previously.
Departmentalization is the process of dividing an organization into blocks or groups of individuals, assignments, structures, and so on, that have common characteristics and functions. In the classic sense, departmentalization is usually thought of as the division of the curricula offerings of schools into English, mathematics, social sciences, and the like. The degree to which a school or school system uses departmentalization is often dependent on the size of the organization. Departmentalization offers both advantages and disadvantages to any organization. The concept in education allows teachers and others to specialize in particular subjects and fields. In a large high school setting, academic teachers may even specialize into specific fields of subject matter. The major disadvantage with departmentalization is that the process often results in employees (in this case, teachers) becoming so absorbed in the development and needs of the specialized department that they lose sight of the needs of the organization.
Almost all bureaucratic-type organizations are pyramidal in design. At the top of the pyramid is the individual with authority over the organization and who is considered to be ultimately responsible for the success or failure of the organization. Normally, the individual holding this position has direct authority over 3 or 4 employees who also hold authority over employees below them. One aspect of this concept is that in the pyramidal structure, the number of employees directly supervised by an administrator decreases as the position increases up in the organization.
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