Organizational Structure and Culture

To understand the organizational culture of a company, one needs to start by looking at the history. Lakeshore Learning Materials was born from a divorced mother of three named Ethelyn Kaplan, who took a dream and a chance by moving her family to California in 1954 to open a toy store. When she started noticing that teachers were interested in her material, Ethelyn realized that she needed to expand her business into educational materials. 60 years later, Lakeshore Learning Materials has grown into a company with over 2000 employees, 60 retail stores throughout the United States and growing. Lakeshore Learning Materials is currently headed by Ethelyn’s grandsons, Bo and Josh Kaplan. Under the supervision of Bo and Josh, Lakeshore continues to be a leader in the Educational Materials, yet still able to keep the family culture that their grandmother started. Highest quality customer service and hard work are the core values that shape Lakeshore’s Organizational Strategy. These high expectations aren’t hard for employees at Lakeshore because the company is so loved by everyone that works there, that they give nothing less than the best.

Organizational structure refers to the way that an organization arranges people and jobs so that its work can be performed and its goals can be met. According to USA their structure states in order to provide clear alignment and focus for the planning process of USAA’s organizational structure, a planning team was assembled with strategic-thought leaders to author a strategic market outlook.

Having organizational structure also entails having what is called an organization chart. An organization chart is a diagram that shows the structure of an organization and the relationships and relative ranks of its parts and positions/jobs. Sherill believes you need an organization chart so that you are aware of who to report to. Where Sherill is currently employed, has not had anything set up this way in a few years. People are not sure who they are to report to and often report to whoever they feel like. She has seen a few employees leave the company for other jobs because they felt that their job lacked structure and it was difficult for them to work in a place like that.

(10 pts.) Discuss how organizational architecture and corporate culture are related. Use an example of a real-life firm and discuss how its corporate culture blends with its organizational architecture.

Organizational structure has been set up to facilitate all goal achievements. It is a way to motivate their employees and get them to work together. It also helps its employees to follow the organizations goals, and work together as a team. In order to do this, they need to have an organized structure to be able to run the company smoothly. A main foundation of every organization is to post their mission statement and goals everywhere so that their employees can see them. An organizational culture can consist of common shared beliefs and values that are established by the organization’s leader, and then communicated and reinforce through various methods, this helps shape employee perceptions, behaviors and understanding. Overall, organizational structure and culture can effect progress of many organizations in a positive and negative way.

Structure is the basis through which an organization seeks to create control the direction of an organization. This is completed through clear definitions of the allocation of work, differentiation, and the coordination of having those responsibilities working together towards the efforts of the organization, integration (Bolman & Deal, 1993, pp). Through these methods, the organization is able to devise a division of labor that collaborates to bring about the missions and goals of an organization. The structure that comes about from this can be varied in their rigidness and flexibility it allows, and to an extent this is a great contribution to its success.

The organization culture as a leadership concept has been identified as one of the many components that leaders can use to grow a dynamic organization. Leadership in organizations starts the culture formation process by imposing their assumptions and expectations on their followers. Once culture is established and accepted, they become a strong leadership tool to communicate the leader 's beliefs and values to organizational members, and especially new comers. When leaders promote ethical culture, they become successful in maintaining organizational growth, the good services demanded by the society, the ability to address problems before they become disasters and consequently are competitive against rivals. The leader 's success will depend to a large extent, on his knowledge and understanding of the organizational culture. The leader who understands his organizational culture and takes it seriously is capable of predicting the outcome of his decisions in preventing any anticipated consequences. What then is organizational culture? The concept of organizational culture has been defined from many perspectives in the literature. There is no one single definition for organizational culture. The topic of organizational culture has been studied from many perspectives and disciplines, such as anthropology, sociology, organizational behavior, and organizational leadership to name a few. Deal defines organizational culture as values,

As known each organization has a set objective to be achieved. Hence depending on the objective & to achieve those objectives, an organization can be structured in many difference ways: the 2 basic division, is the division of labour& coordination & supervision. These are done to be in-line with the organizational objective.

Directions: For this assignment you will need to choose an organization or business you are familiar with or would like to learn more about. You will be focusing on learning about the organizational structure that is being used and the driving and restraining forces.

Organisational Culture is defined as what the employees perceive and how this perception creates a pattern of beliefs, values and, expectations. Organisational culture differs from organizational climate. Climate refers to more temporary attitudes, feelings and perceptions of individuals (Schneider, 1990). Culture on the other hand is an enduring, slow to change, core characteristic of organisations which is an implicit often indiscernible aspects of organisations, climate refers to more overt, observable attributes of organisations.. Organisational culture is “the way things are” in the organisation rather that people’s transitory attitudes about them

The organization chart that will work for this will be the departmentalization of function. “Functional departmentalization groups together jobs involving the same or similar activities as it allows the organization to staff all important positions with functional experts and

When it comes to business as any organizations it requires a structure, based on the resources and demands organization can changed or modify their structure. The most common two structures are vertical and horizontal structure which we see every business organization in global market (Bateman & Snell, 2011). In today’s any business organization theirs and important trait is not only the structure, it is the functions within the organization. An organizing function in management highlights the practices individuals use to interact and work with each other. There are many business organizations that are very successful in their own

Effective organizational structures define how job tasks are subdivided, grouped, coordinated, and managed. Six key components of organizational structures include division of labor, departmentalization, chain of command, span of control, centralization, and formalization (Remme, Jones, Van der Heijden, & De Bono, 2008, p. 79). Each element influence how employees interact with each other to reach organizational goals. Different structures are common in similar organizations among high performing organizations (Reimann, 1974, p. 707). The most appropriate structure will depend on the unique needs and culture of the organization.

OPENNESS. Openness can be defined as a spontaneous expression of feelings and thoughts, and the sharing of these without defensiveness. Openness is in both directions, receiving and giving. Both these may relate to ideas (including suggestions), feedback (including criticism), and feelings. For example, openness means receiving without reservation, and taking steps to encourage more feedback and suggestions from customers, colleagues and others. Similarly, it means giving, without hesitation, ideas, information, feedback, feelings, etc. Openness may also mean spatial openness, in terms of accessibility. Installing internal E-mailing may be a step in this direction: everyone having a computer terminal has access to information which he may

* Political science in explaining how power struggles between groups within organisations can stem from variances in performance and agendas.