Introduction: Drawing an organizational chart seems like such an easy thing to do, but surprisingly some organizations do not have an up-to-date chart for their current organization structure. Some large, publicly traded organizations have some type of chart that at least shows the way their top level is structured. This exercise should help you learn more about organizational structure.
Internet Assignment: Use any search engines that are available to you to look up the organization chart of several organizations. You may have to go to documents that are reported to the Securities and Exchange Commission in order to find them. Pick four companies for which you can find good and recent organization charts and that are in different industries. See if you can describe the configurational and operational aspects of structure described in this chapter.
Follow-up: How difficult was it to find the organization charts of actual companies? How extensive were the organization charts that you found? Were they up-to-date? Finally, respond to the following questions:
- How many levels did the companies show on the charts? Did the companies vary a great deal, or were they pretty similar?
- Did the companies vary in terms of the span of control? How much?
- Were you able to see to what extent each organization is decentralized or how formalized its rule are? Why or why not?
