Question

What are the major types of structural change exhibited by organizations pursuing tq?

Answer 1

Change in Organizations

Most organizations have to change as part of keeping up with the competition or adjusting to new market trends or technologies. Things such as mergers, restructuring, technological advancements, process enhancements, changing customer demands and new product lines are fairly common in today's business environments. If you recall, reasons for change can be attributed to an organization's external environment as well as their internal environment. This lesson will focus specifically on those changes that occur in a company's internal environment, including structural, strategic, people and process changes.

Structural Change

Structural changes are those changes made to the organization's structure that might stem from internal or external factors and typically affect how the company is run. Structural changes include things such as the organization's hierarchy, chain of command, management systems, job structure and administrative procedures. Circumstances that usually create the need for structural change include mergers and acquisitions, job duplication, changes in the market and process or policy changes.

For example, let's say that Catelyn's Communications decided to merge with Cory's Communications. As a part of that merger, duplicate departments needed to be eliminated, employees from both companies needed to be reassigned to new positions or terminated, managers acquired new employees, duplicate management positions were eliminated, new policies and procedures needed to be created (and old ones retired) and job functions needed to be realigned to fit the new company structure. Likewise, if the merger was a result of changes in the marketplace, structural changes might also need to be made to respond to the market shift, such as creating new departments that can produce whatever the market is demanding from communication providers.

Strategic Change

Strategic change involves making changes to the overall goals, purpose, strategy or mission of an organization.