Individual Assignment: Analysis of an Organization's Structure and Operations

The major assignment for this course is designed to give you insight into the way real-world organizations work. You will select an organization and then collect and analyze information about the organization using concepts and theories from the course. Late submissions for the assignment will incur a penalty of 10% per day. The completed report should be deposited into the relevant course assignment folder/dropbox in Microsoft Word format. No other formats will be acceptable. 

The due dates for the assignment is noted on the course schedule. Selecting an Organization There are two approaches to selecting an organization. One approach for choosing an organization is to choose a well-known organization about which a lot has been written. Large companies like IBM, Apple Computers, Google, and Air Canada receive extensive coverage in business periodicals such as Fortune, Business Week, and Canadian Business. Every year, for example, the Financial Post publishes a list of the 500 largest corporations in Canada. If you choose a company on the Financial Post’s list, you can be sure that considerable information is published about it. The best sources of information are business periodicals like Canadian Business, Fortune, Business Week and Forbes; news magazines like Time and Newsweek; the Financial Post, the National Post, the Globe and Mail, the Wall Street Journal, and other newspapers. In addition, you should check industry and trade publications. 

Finally, you should take advantage of the Internet and explore the WWW to find information on your company. Most large companies have detailed websites that provide a considerable amount of information. You can find these sites using a search engine such as Google or Yahoo and then download the information you need. If you consult these sources, you will obtain a lot of information that you can use to complete the assignment. The second approach to selecting a company is to choose one located in your city or town – for example, a large department store, manufacturing company, hotel, or nonprofit organization (such as a hospital) where you or somebody you know works. You could contact the owners or managers of the organization and ask whether they would be willing to talk to you about the way they operate and how they design and manage their company. Each approach to selecting a company has advantages and disadvantages.

The advantage of selecting a local company and doing your own information gathering is that in face-to-face interviews you can ask for detailed information that may be unavailable from published sources. You will gain an especially rich picture of the way a company operates by doing your research personally. The problem is that the local organization you choose has to be big enough to offer you insight into the way organizations work. In general, it should employ at least 20 people and have at least three levels in its hierarchy. If you use written sources to study a very large organization, you will get a lot of interesting information that relates to organizational theory, because the organization is large and complex and is confronting many of the challenges discussed in the textbook. But you may not be able to obtain all the detailed information you want. Whichever selection approach you use, be sure that you have access to enough information to complete most (if not all) of the questions below. 

There may be instances where you are unable to complete certain questions. However, to compensate for this lack of information, you might have very detailed information about the company’s structure or product lines. The issue is to make sure that you can gain access to enough information to write an interesting and comprehensive paper. If you cannot complete all the questions in each section (see sections A-E below) you should choose another organization where more complete information is available. Points will be deducted if a question is not answered (see grading key below for more information). The issues that you will use to conduct an analysis of the organizations in the assignment are as follows (and these issues should be used as the basis for organizing your paper into discrete sections):

1. What is the name of the organization? Give a short account of the history of the company (e.g., when was it founded?; who founded it?). 

2. Briefly describe the way it has grown and developed. What does the organization do? What goods and services does it produce/provide? 

1. a) Describe the main interorganizational linkage mechanisms (e.g., mergers, strategic alliances, long-term contracts) that your organization uses to manage resources in the environment.

b) Using resource dependency theory, discuss why the organization chose to manage its interdependencies in this way. 

c) Do you think the organization has selected the most appropriate linkage mechanisms? Why or why not?

2. List the major roles, functions, or departments in your organization. Does your organization have many divisions? If your organization engages in many businesses, list the major divisions of the company. 

3. (a) Is your organization centralized or decentralized? How do you know? 

(b) Is it highly differentiated? Can you identify any integrating mechanisms used by your organization? What is the match between the complexity of differentiation and the complexity of the integrating mechanisms that are used? 

(c) Is behaviour in the organization very standardized? What can you tell about the level of formalization by looking at the number and kinds of rules the organization uses? 

4. Does your analysis in question 3 lead you to think that your organization conforms more to the organic or to the mechanistic model of organizational structure? Briefly explain why you think it is organic or mechanistic. 

5. (a) How many people does the organization employ? 

(b) How many levels are there in the organization’s hierarchy? Is the organization tall or flat? 

(c) What is the span of control of the CEO? Is this span appropriate, or is it too wide or narrow?

(d) Do you think your organization does a good or poor job in managing its hierarchy of authority? Give reasons for your answer.

1. If the company has an annual report, what does the report describe as the company’s organizational mission? Which goals seem most important to the organization? Which strategies does the organization use to achieve its goals? How successfully is the organization pursuing its strategies? Which of the goals or strategies should be changed? Why? 

2. Read its annual reports to determine which kinds of measures the organization uses to evaluate its performance and overall effectiveness. How well is the organization doing when judged by various criteria such as profitability, efficiency, and employee satisfaction? 

3. a) Draw a stakeholder map or chart that identifies your organization’s major stakeholder groups. 

b) Based on the types of conflicts outlined in the course textbook, what kind of conflicts between its stakeholder groups would you expect to occur the most? 

1. Draw a chart and/or describe your organization’s domain. List the organization’s products and customers and the forces in the task and general environment (separately) that have an effect on it. Which are the most important forces that the organization has to deal with? 

2. Analyze the influence of the environment on the organization in terms of simple-complex and stable-unstable dimensions. From this analysis, how would you characterize the level of uncertainty in your organization’s environment? 

1. What kind of structure (e.g., functional, divisional, geographical) does your organization have? Draw a diagram showing its structure and identify the major subunits or divisions in the organization.

2. Why does the company use this kind of structure? Provide a brief account of the advantages and disadvantages associated with this structure for your organization. 

3. Is your organization experiencing any particular problems in managing its activities? Can you suggest a more appropriate structure that your company might adopt to solve these problems? 

1. The paper is to be written in a professional manner with due diligence in terms of grammar, spelling, and clarity. Note: Do not overlook this aspect of the paper, as grades will be deducted if it is apparent that students did not take the time to carefully edit their work. 

2. Any secondary sources should be properly referenced using the APA format. It is extremely important that you reference your secondary sources as plagiarism is a serious offence! Guidelines on how to reference citations both within your text and in the Reference Section (to be placed at the end of your paper) via APA formatting can be found online through a simple Google search. There is also a link to a pdf document in the syllabus entitled "APA" that should be helpful. 

3. A title page that includes a title, your name, student number, course information, etc.

4. For the assignment the main body of the paper (minus the title page and appendices) should be no less than 10 pages and no more than 15 pages (approximately 2500-3000 words). Please adhere to the specified page lengths. The assignment should be typed double-spaced using Times New Roman 12 point font with one-inch margins. Any figures, tables, diagrams or other supplementary materials should go in the appendices and not in the main body of the paper. Each assignment must include a general introduction to orient the reader to the purpose of the paper as well as a conclusion section that summarizes the overall paper. 

5. There is no limit for appendices, however, only include supplementary materials that are necessary. Each table, figure, etc. that is included should be clearly referenced in the main body of the paper. Any tables, figures, diagrams, etc. that you incorporate should be visually appealing and of good quality. Appendix materials should be electronically generated and not hand-drawn. If the material is taken from a secondary source, it should also be referenced properly.

6. Use headings to organize and structure each assignment paper. You should use the specific questions as the basis for your specific section headings (e.g., A1: Organizational

E3: Activity Management Problems) as the headings to organize your paper. 

Important: You need to notify the instructor by course e-mail when a late submission is completed and deposited - so the instructor knows to go to the dropbox to look for the submission.

Note: This is the grading key I provide to my graders for the purpose of standardizing the assessments across students. 

1. The paper should be organized according to the key sections A-E. There is no need to have subheadings for the individual questions within each section but it is fine if these subheadings are included. Subtract 15 points if there is no organizational scheme as per above. 

2. There should be a brief introduction section and brief conclusion section. Subtract 5 points for each section missing.

3. If the paper is poorly written with grammatical errors, poor sentence structure, or paragraph breaks, give the student a few examples where this is a problem. Subtract 15 points if writing quality is not up to par. 

4. References should be in APA format. Failure to use APA format deduct 15 points. Errors in not using APA formatting correctly (either in the way citations are used in the text or the reference section) should lead to a deduction of 5, 10, or 15 points depending upon the extent to which these errors appear. 

5. If there is a suspicion of a direct quote without proper acknowledgement this is technically plagiarism. If this is found please contact me and I will examine the paper myself to determine next steps. 

6. If any of the questions within each of the 5 sections are not addressed deduct 5 points for each question not answered – unless the student explicitly notes the question was not answered with a reasonable explanation for why. 

7. Lack of a title page deduct 5 points.

8. If the student has omitted an entire section they have to provide a reasonable justification as to why this is the case. Otherwise deduct 10 points for each missing section. 

9. If a student has not clearly answered a given question deduct 5 points each time this occurs. 

10. They should be using 12-point font and a page limit of 15 with a minimum of 10 (not including appendices, references etc.). These limits are somewhat flexible. If a student turns in a paper that is shorter than 10 pages but well done I would not worry about it. Likewise if it goes over a few pages, fine. Use your best judgment on this. If you are unhappy with the lack of page adherence deduct 5 points. Theoretical, conceptual or factual inaccuracies, misunderstandings or misinterpretations (-5) for each.