Question

reference organization chart 3.2:

this structure:

• has caused high levels of bureaucracy.
• should be changed immediately to a horizontal grouping if the company is growing.
• would have increased the span of control for the general manager when the assistant manager position was added.
• could have a weakness of slow response to environmental changes that require coordination across functional areas.

Explanation:

🆕 New Concept Discovered: Organizational Structures and Designs
Understanding how different company setups affect communication and decision-making.

Step 1: Identify the type of organizational structure

The provided chart shows an organization grouped by specialized departments: Accounting, Production, Marketing, and Distribution. This setup is known as a functional organizational structure, where employees are grouped based on their specific skills and tasks.

Step 2: Analyze the characteristics of a functional structure

In a functional structure, decision-making is centralized (flowing from the General Manager down through the Assistant Manager), and departments operate in specialized "silos."

While this structure is highly efficient for routine tasks within each department, it creates barriers to communication between different departments. Because information must travel up the hierarchy to be shared across functions, the organization is often slow to respond to external market changes that require quick, cross-departmental collaboration.

Step 3: Evaluate the given options

• "has caused high levels of bureaucracy."
• Incorrect: While functional structures have some hierarchy, this is a relatively small, simple organization (only a few levels and departments) and does not inherently exhibit extreme or complex bureaucracy.
• "should be changed immediately to a horizontal grouping if the company is growing."
• Incorrect: Growth does not mean a company must "immediately" switch to a horizontal structure; many growing companies successfully use divisional or matrix structures instead.
• "would have increased the span of control for the General Manager when the Assistant Manager position was added."
• Incorrect: Adding an Assistant Manager inserts a layer of hierarchy between the General Manager and the lower departments. This decreases the General Manager's direct span of control (the number of direct reports), rather than increasing it.
• "could have a weakness of slow response to environmental changes that require coordination across functional areas."
• Correct: This is a classic, well-documented disadvantage of a functional structure. Because departments are separated into specialized silos, coordinating a response to rapid external changes across different departments (like Production and Marketing) takes longer.

Answer:

could have a weakness of slow response to environmental changes that require coordination across functional areas.