Organisational Structure- part 1

In today's post, I want to discuss the distinct of an organisational Structure, which i also been assigned to a organisation team that looking to create a new organisational structure, for a sport club called The Mighty Dodgers, it's a new dodgeball club bases in Crewe that provide coaching program for East Cheshire school children. 

This is another new experience for me, and another new skill to me to developed. 

Organisational Structure, as known as Organisational Chart, it's usually a hierarchical arrangement authority, communication lines, positions and roles of an organisation. Organisational structure presents a clear picture of how the roles are layout, and which position is responsible and control for certain area of work. 

Organisational structure also affects organisational action in two big ways. Firstly, it provides the foundation on which standard operating procedures and routines rest. Secondly, it determines which individuals get to participate in which decision-making processes, and thus to what extent their views shape the organization’s actions.

The skill to develop the organisational structure is a very important process for any organisation at any market size. The purpose of this is not just a paper with the position for the organisation, it shows the attitude within the organisation and the duties, responsibilities each roles and position are in charged with. 

You can imaging what will happen to the organisation without the organisational structure, there will be a huge confusion in communication line, and employers or volunteers will be confuse in their responsible that lead to demotivation, also there would be a huge confusion when it comes to replacing roles. 

In other sense, they organisation will be very disorganise which can causes a delay in organisation process, and this could have after-affect that lead to lost of clients, lost of opportunities for the organisation to make big profit. 

During the process of creating the organisational structure with the team, I learnt how difficult it is to create the structure, because we have to consider the size of the organisational structure itself, and how it affects the communication in the organisation and also the culture of the organisation. 


The longer and deeper the organisational structure, the more difficult the communication line will be, because the decision has to come down through more departments before it can reaches to the bottom row worker in the organisational structure. For example, in a 10 rows organisational structure, a CEO (the top) wants to change the attitude of the worker (the bottom), the message will have to go through 8 departments before deliver to the workers. On the other hand, in a 5 rows organisational structure, the same message will only have to go through 3 departments; and let's say each department will take a day to pass through the message, a 5 rows organisational structure takes less time than the 10 rows organisational structure. 

Figure 1

As you can see from the self-created organisational structure Figure 1, the structure is deeper and the communication line within this organisation can be time-consuming. The reason is the amount of department they have in between the International Headquarters to the Corps and Technical services, which means, the International Headquarter want to pass an order to Corps and Technical services, the message will have to gone through Territorial Headquarters, then Divisional Headquarter and last to Corps and Technical services. 

On the other hand, from the self-created organisational structure Figure 2, you can see the structure is more simple and straight forward. It also started with CEO on the top, but it only comes down to 1 department or headquarter, and each departments is under controlled few project teams. In this case, the communication line is more simple as it only has to gone through one department from the top to the bottom. 

Figure 2

The strength of this organisation structure is the employers would feel more involve as they are closer to the CEO, which their performance can be assess at any time. The organization's objective can be more straight forward and more direct. However, this type of the organisational structure is more for the small size market organisation,

Also another important aspect that I learnt throughout the creating process was, to analysis and be attention with the level of power or attitude each heads of department are capable with, so we then decided weather to put more or less departments under his control. 

The purpose of this is to make sure there's a responsible leader to lead and control the departments under him. For example, if manager A is responsible type and manager B is lazy type, then we would put a department under manager A to control. 

If you want to know how the organisation team and I created the organisational Structure, please follow the next post!

See you later, 
Billy