Question

Advantages and disadvantages of existing funtional organization

Answer 1

The most obvious advantage of a functional organization is that grouping employees by specialization ensures a dependable level of departmental competence. This is particularly so for large organizations that have several functional levels within a department – a particular tech group that follows up on tech issues not resolved by the primary telephone tech support group, for example. Membership in this group could require a bachelor's degree in computer science, a manager's recommendation and a minimum number of years of field experience. This ensures that support issues moved up to the follow-up group are handled by fully qualified personnel, which increases customer satisfaction and retention.

Some benefits of a functional organization can become disadvantages. Having departments populated by employees specializing in specific work areas means that fruitful interactions between employees with different perspectives are reduced or eliminated.

One of technology entrepreneur Elon Musk's advantages over competitors is that most of them have expertise primarily in a single field. Because Musk brings to a new task knowledge obtained in several different areas, he has repeatedly brought useful and profitable perspectives that eluded his competitors to a current project. His Boring Project, for example, a design and implementation for an ultra high-speed underground people mover, is a spinoff of Space X and borrows technological elements from space travel to solve terrestrial transportation problems.