Gwendolyn White
May 25, 2014
HSM/220

Mission Statement Internet Search

Departmentalization by function enables employees to specialize and work together efficiently. Employees can develop skills in depth and can progress within a department as they master those skills. Top management can easily direct and control various departments’ activities. There may be a lack of communication among the different departments. Individual employees may begin to identify with their department and its goals rather than with the goals of the organization as a whole. People may not be trained to take different managerial responsibilities; rather, they tend to become narrow specialists. People in the same department tend to think alike and may need input from outside the department to become more creative.
Matrix organizations advantages and disadvantages are when isolated in a functional area, employees may have more difficulty benefiting from the skills and experiences of those in other areas. In a matrix structure, employees have constant contact with members of other functional areas by their membership in project teams. Through the project team, employees have the opportunity to develop a wider set of skills than they would in a purely functional structure.
In a team-based organizational structure group employees perform similar job functions into lateral teams. Team members support each other, make their own decisions and rely on their own expertise to make changes in processes, policies and procedures. In theory, this approach requires minimal overhead and less management for experienced personnel. This strategy presents many challenges for inexperienced teams. While this model makes it possible for teams to respond quickly without layers of management approval, without sufficient expertise, teams falter. This is a disadvantage of the project team structure. An advantage of project team is organizing workers into project team’s lets you assign designated employees to specific sets of tasks. It also allows you to train selected individuals to perform these tasks. This way, when an employee can’t complete the task, due to illness, injury or personal commitment, you can reassign the job to another worker. When people work as a team, they understand the roles and responsibilities of the other team members. Work doesn’t need to stop when someone is out for the day.
When using the collegial model freedom of discussion and freedom of decision-making define the collegial model, and this freedom to indulge in unfettered discourse about various topics and fields is the key advantage of the collegial model. Supplementary advantages of the collegial model include the lack of authoritarian rule over those who debate issues and seek general consensus. Basically, people in the collegial model setting can achieve consensus without being beholden to one power figure, and this is a fairer, more egalitarian method of reaching decisions about important academic matters that may affect courses of study, the student body, and administration. Of course, what are advantages in one sense can be serious and problematic disadvantages in another sense. For example, decision-making in the collegial framework may be difficult, as everyone is chiming in with their own suggestions and opinions. Without one authoritarian figure to push things through, the collegial model may resemble a bustling House of Commons, filled with arguing councilors who can't agree on anything.