Organizational Structure Concept
The Organizational Structure is the connection link between the organizations’ strategic guidelines and its performance in the market and can be divided in macro-structure (related with the entire organization divisions) and micro-structure (related with the organization of the activities inside a division).
The importance of the structure for the implementation of a plan lies in the fact to be through it that the relation among the people who constitute an organization become formal, by connections of independence and cooperation. To better understand these relations is convenient to approach some fundamental concepts, namely the authority, responsibility and committee concepts.
For a better understanding of the organizations’ structures is usually made its graphic representation, the chart, which allows viewing quickly and easily the several component members of the structure, the hierarchic path, the formal communication and the interdependence between the parts. Implicit in this chart concept are the works’ division and departmentalization, the hierarchy and coordination.
From the several kinds of structure that the organization can assume stand out the hierarchic structures (hierarchy as criteria of the work division), the functional structures (functions as criteria of the work division), the staff & line structure (simultaneous use of hierarchic and functions criteria), divisional structures (products or geographic units as criteria of the work division) and, finally, the matrix structure (simultaneous use of functions and products or geographic units criteria). Naturally, we can find several kinds of variations to these kinds of structures, like the use of distinctive criteria of the work division according to the department, the use of divisional structures with staff members, among others.
