Convenience

Chapter 6:
Organization Structure and Design
1 6 1
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THE BASIC ELEMENTS OF ORGANIZING
The term
organization structure and design
refers to the overall set of elements that can be
used to configure an organization. This section introduces and describes these elements:
job specialization, departmentalization, reporting relationships, distribution of authority,
and coordination.
Job Specialization
The first building block of organization structure is job specialization.
Job specialization
is the degree to which the overall task of the organization is broken down and divided
into smaller component parts. For example, when Walt Disney started his company, he
did everything himself—wrote cartoons, drew them, added character voices, and then
marketed them to theaters. As the business grew, though, he eventually hired others to
perform many of these same functions. As growth continued, so, too, did specialization.
For example, as animation artists work on Disney movies today, they may specialize in
generating computer images of a single character or doing only background scenery.
Others provide voices, and marketing specialists develop promotional campaigns.
Today, the Walt Disney Company has literally thousands of different specialized jobs.
Clearly, no one person could perform them all.