Summary
Appex corporation has spent the last 3 years developing and trying out new organizational structures as it changes from a small organization of only 25 employees to a large one which grows an estimated 50 percent every six months. T o do this they have recruited Shikhar Ghosh to the position of COO with the promise of the CEO position in the future. Each of these structures implemented by Ghosh has revealed strengths and weaknesses after they were implemented and as 1991 approaches it is time for another change. The purpose of this paper is to show that a move to a more bureaucratic system is needed more and more as the company reaches larger sizes. When the company is later incorporated into a larger organization this would also facilitate such a move by more easily integrating into the new parent company’s existing bureaucracy.
The key problem facing Shikhar Ghosh upon arriving at Appex is the chaotic condition of the company’s current structure. What was once a tight-knit group of employees is now a group of people with no clear-cut job responsibilities or work ethic. He reports that “Everybody just did what they felt like. For instance, customer service people were supposed to start at 8:00 AM.
They wouldn’t arrive until 10:00 AM, but they would work until 2:00 AM. Everybody did things on their own time, and the attitude toward the customer was-“we’ll call you back.” (CoursePak)
The cellular industry was beginning to explode and Appex found themselves having to add new employees at a rate of ten new employees per month. Ghosh restructured the company about every six months each time that the company grew by fifty percent. He started by trying a circular structure with the senior executives in the middle with each group of descending importance on each outward concentric circle ending with the customer. He followed this with a more