All work, whether physical or mental, can be organized in three ways.
It can be organized according to various stages of the work process. When we build a house, we first lay the foundation, then build the roof and roof, and finally decorate the interior.
It can also be organized in such a way that "work" moves to various sections of various skills and tools in turn. For example, in a traditional metal factory that manufactures a single product, a set of drilling machines and lathes are arranged in the first row, a punch press is arranged in the second row, and heat treatment equipment is arranged in the third row, and metal workpieces are moved from one group of tools and their skilled operators to another group. Or, for another example, students in universities-the "raw materials" of the educational process-move from one classroom to another, from one professor to another, and from one course to another. The professor of each course only teaches the topics he specializes in, while the students eventually come out as an "intellectual" or at least a person with a diploma.
Finally, we can also form a group of workers with different skills and using different tools, so that the group will move to "work" while the work itself is static. A film production team-directors, actors, electricians and technicians, and sound engineers-"went on location shooting". Everyone is engaged in highly specialized work, but they work as a group.
"Functional organization" is usually described as "closely related skills". In fact, it has the duality of organizing work by stages and organizing work by technology. Some traditional functions, such as manufacturing and marketing, contain many unrelated skills, for example, manufacturing contains the skills of mechanics and production planners, and marketing contains the skills of salesmen and market researchers. Manufacturing and marketing are different stages in the production process. However, other functions, such as accounting and personnel, are organized by technology. However, in any functional organization, work moves in various stages or technologies. Work is mobile, while the position of workers is fixed.
However, in the task team structure, jobs and tasks can be said to be "fixed", while workers with different skills and using different tools form task teams and are assigned to work or positions such as research planning or architectural design of new office buildings.
Functional structure and task team structure are very old organizational designs. The builders of irrigation cities and Egyptian pyramids in the two river basins organized their work according to their functions. The organized and permanent team of "hunting party" can be traced back to earlier until the late ice age.
However, as a conscious, thoughtful and designed structure, both of them are new. The functional organization was defined and designed by henri fayol in the early part of this century. The task force is only now recognized as an organizational design principle.
Work and tasks must be structured and organized. Any organization must apply one or two principles of organizational design for work and tasks, namely, functional structure and task team structure. As we will discuss in the later part of this chapter, many organizations have to apply these two design principles at the same time. All organizations should have an understanding of these two design principles.
Functional structure
The biggest advantage of functional organization design is its clarity. Everyone has a "stronghold". Everyone knows his own work. It is a highly stable organization.
However, the price of clarity and stability is that it is difficult for everyone, including senior functional personnel, to understand the overall task and relate their work to it. Although this organizational structure is stable, it is rigid and cannot adapt to changes. It can't train and test people for the future. Generally speaking, it is easy to make people just want to make a little improvement on what they have done, and they are unwilling to accept new ideas and new working methods.
The advantages and disadvantages of the functional principle have their own characteristics in terms of economic norms. In the most ideal situation, functional organizations can work highly economically. At the top, only a few people can make the organization run, that is, engage in "organization", "information exchange", "coordination" and "mediation". Other people can do their own work. However, it is often in a bad situation and extremely uneconomical. As long as it reaches a medium scale or complexity, it will produce "friction" It soon became a misunderstanding, a faction, an independent kingdom and an organization that established the Berlin Wall. It will soon require all kinds of complicated, expensive and clumsy management means-coordinators, committees, meetings, trouble handlers and special commissioners-which will waste everyone's time and generally do not solve many problems. Moreover, this tendency of degeneration is not only popular among different "functional departments". The major functional departments and their subordinate units are also rapidly becoming inefficient and require increasing efforts to maintain their internal operation.
Another way of saying this situation is that when the functional system design can adapt to changes, the psychological needs of employees are very small. Employees feel a high degree of safety in their work and mutual relations. However, as long as the functional design is applied to a slightly larger scale or a slightly more complicated degree, it will cause emotional tension, hostility and insecurity. Workers will feel that they and their functional departments are despised, surrounded and attacked. They will think that their primary responsibility is to defend their functional department, so that their functional department will not be infringed by other functional departments, so that it will not be squeezed out. It is often heard that people complain that "no one realizes that the company can survive because of us engineers" (or "we salesmen" and "we accountants"). Therefore, defeating the internal "hateful enemy" is a more gratifying victory than making the enterprise flourish. It is precisely because the functional system design rarely requires the employees of functional departments to bear any responsibility for the overall achievement and success, so a poorly used-or excessively expanded-functional system structure is easy to make employees feel unsafe and narrow-minded.
Functional organization takes efforts as the center, which is both its basic advantages and its basic disadvantages. The manager of each functional department thinks that his functional department is the most important. This leads to a great emphasis on skills and professional standards. However, it also makes the staff of functional departments subordinate the interests of other functional departments to the interests of their own departments, if not the interests of the whole enterprise. There is no real remedy for this tendency in functional departments. Every manager has a commendable desire to do a good job, and the price is the desire to expand the status of each function.
In a small functional organization, information exchange is quite good. However, as long as the functional organization reaches a medium scale, information exchange will not work. Even within various functional departments (plus marketing departments), as long as the functional departments become larger or more complex, information exchange is weakened. Workers are increasingly becoming professional workers and mainly care about their narrow professional fields.
The most extreme example is the largest and most specialized functional organization-large universities. However, a large manufacturing department or the commercial loan department of a big bank is similar to the famous description of a large university faculty: "A group of anarchists connected to the parking lot by a * * *."
As a decision-making structure, functional organizations-even on a fairly small scale-work badly. Because, in general, decisions can only be made at the highest level of functional organizations. Only people at the top can look at the overall situation of the enterprise. As a result, decisions are often easily misunderstood and poorly executed in organizations. People often look at various decisions from the viewpoint of "who is right" rather than "what is right". Moreover, due to the high stability and low adaptability of functional organizations, the challenge of doing something really new and different is often suppressed rather than openly raised for handling.
Functional organizations are also poor in personnel training, preparation and testing. Functional organization must make its personnel mainly pay attention to acquiring knowledge and related abilities. However, professionals in the functional system may be narrow in their vision, skills and loyalty. In functional organizations, it is often inherently emphasized not to show "inappropriate curiosity" about the work of other functional departments or professional skills, that is, to emphasize narrow departmentalization.
Moreover, functional organization often makes people unsuitable for management-this is because it mainly emphasizes functional skills rather than results and achievements. In fact, the higher the technical level of an organizational unit in terms of functions, the less attention it pays to management, and the more difficult it is to train people to be a manager.
Functional organizations have exposed these limitations and shortcomings from the beginning, so people have been trying to make up for their shortcomings, especially their biggest shortcoming: functional organizations do not direct the vision of functional personnel to make contributions and achievements, but tend to make efforts and be busy.
Limited scope of application
Even if the functional organization can be applied, its scope is limited to homework. Top management is a special "job" (see Chapter 50), but it is not a "functional" job, and it cannot be applied to functional organizations. If the functional organization is adopted anywhere, it makes the top leaders weak.
After 1900, large companies in Germany tend to construct their top management according to their functions; Many German companies are still doing this. Indeed, there is also a senior management team, that is, the board of directors in German company law. But there is only one person related to top management, that is, the general manager. Other members of the top management are the heads of major functional departments and mainly care about their own departments. As a result, the general manager became a dictator and the board of directors degenerated into an empty name in law. Sometimes, there is no top management at all, and each functional department goes its own way.
For innovative work, the principle of functional system is even more inapplicable (see Chapter 61). What we are trying to do in the innovation work is something we haven't done before, that is, something we don't know yet. In innovation, we really need technologies from different disciplines. However, we don't know where and when we need them, how long it will take, how much it will take, or how much weight it will take. Therefore, innovation work cannot be organized on the basis of functional organization. Functional organization is not suitable for innovative work.
Where does the functional organization principle work?
In those enterprises that design functional organizations based on it, the principle of functional organization is very feasible. At the beginning of this century, Henry Fa Yueer's functional design model was the coal mine company he operated. It was a fairly large enterprise at that time, but now it is a relatively small enterprise. Except for a few engineers, it employs manual workers who do the same kind of work. There is only one product in coal mine, and only its scale varies with different customers. Coal mines need no other treatment except simple coal washing and sorting. At least at that time, there were only three markets for coal mines-steel mills, power plants and households. In Fa Yueer's era, although the technology of coal mining changed quite quickly-when Fa Yueer started to work, he had not started to use explosives, but when he retired, he had already used mechanical coal cutters-but the coal mining process itself had not changed at all. The only thing that can be drawn from a coal mine is coal. There is not much scope for innovation.
Fa Yueer's company is the kind of enterprise that can be well organized by the functional design principle. Any more complex, dynamic or career-oriented enterprise requires all kinds of ability to make achievements, which is not available in the principle of functional system. If the application of functional structure exceeds the limit of Fa Yueer model, it will soon cause great waste of time and energy, and there is great danger. It is just busy to guide the energy of enterprises not to achieve results but to make mistakes. For those enterprises that exceed Fa Yueer model in scale, complexity and innovation scope, functional design should only be used as one of the design principles, not the only one. Moreover, even for those enterprises that are suitable for Fa Yueer model, the design and structure of top management need a different design principle.
Task force
A task team is composed of thousands of people with different educational backgrounds, skills and knowledge who are drawn from different fields of the organization (its "stronghold") to complete a specific task-usually a small number. Generally, there is a group leader or group leader who has been leading the group during its existence. However, the leadership style depends on the work logic of each period and the special stage of work progress. There is no hierarchy in the group, only the difference between senior personnel and ordinary personnel.
Every enterprise-and every other organization-has been using various groups for various non-repetitive temporary tasks. However, until recently, we didn't admit what our nomadic ancestors had known for a long time during the ice age-the task force was also a permanent organizational structure design principle. The mission of the task team is to complete a special task: expedition hunting or product development. But the task force itself may be long-term. The composition of the group may change with different tasks, but its basis remains basically the same. As for individual members, they may be scattered among tasks or belong to several task groups at the same time.
. Some examples
Task forces have become very popular, so there is a real danger of being damaged by following the fashion. Numerous books have been written about "task groups", "planning groups", "free-form organizations" and "small groups". However, giving some examples will better show what a task force is like, how it works and what its necessary conditions are than any theoretical discussion; And what it cannot do.
The task force requires its mission to be constant, while its specific tasks are constantly changing. If the mission is not constant, it may only need a temporary task team-not an organization based on the design of a long-term team. If the specific tasks do not change, or their relative importance or order does not change, then there is no need for task teams, and there is no reason to have task teams.
A task force needs to have a clear and definite goal. It must enable the whole group and every member of the group to get feedback on their work and performance at any time against the goal.
A task force needs leadership. It may be a long-term leader-doctors and nurses in the patient treatment team in the hospital, or a recognized mind in the top management team. Or, the leadership changes with each major stage. However, as the example of the plastic model team shows, at a certain stage, one person must be clearly designated to lead the team at a certain stage of the task. It is not the leader who is responsible for making decisions and giving orders, but for deciding who should participate in a particular stage and work of this group; Responsible for deciding what authority should make decisions and command (see the discussion on Japanese decision-making methods in Chapter 37). Therefore, if "democracy" means making decisions by voting, then the task force is not democratic. It emphasizes authority, but this authority is generated by tasks and is task-centered.
The team as a whole should always be responsible for the task. Everyone contributes his special skills and knowledge, but everyone should always be responsible for the output and achievements of the whole team, not just his own work. The whole task force is a unit.
Members of a group do not need to know each other completely to perform tasks as a group. However, they must understand each other's functions and possible contributions. "Harmony", "consideration" and "interpersonal relationship" are not necessary, but the most important thing is to understand each other's duties and the same task.
Therefore, the first duty of the group leader is to make it clear: to make the goal clear, and to make everyone's role clear, including his own.
Advantages and limitations of the task force principle
The task force has some obvious advantages. Everyone always understands the overall work and makes himself responsible for it. It is good at accepting new ideas and new working methods, and has great adaptability.
It also has great defects. If the team leader does not make clear requirements, the task team will lack clarity. Its stability is not good. Its economy is also poor. A task team requires continuous attention to its management, the relationship among the personnel within the team, the work arrangement, explanation, research, information exchange, etc. A large part of all members' energy is used to keep abreast of the situation. Although everyone in the group knows the same tasks, they don't always know their own specific tasks. He may be too interested in other people's work and not pay enough attention to his own.
The task force is adaptable. They are good at accepting experiments, new ideas and new working methods. They are the best measures to overcome the isolation and narrow views of functional departments. Any professional should take part in some task groups in his working career.
However, the task force is only slightly better than the functional organization in training people to take up higher management jobs or testing people's work performance. The task force has neither clear information exchange nor clear decision. The whole team must constantly explain to itself and other managers in the organization what it is trying to do, what it is doing and what it has achieved. The group must constantly affirm that the decisions that must be made have been understood by others; Otherwise, there is a danger of making decisions that it should not make-for example, decisions that affect the whole company.
The failure of the task force-its failure rate is quite high-is often mainly due to its failure to discipline itself with self-discipline and responsibility. Because of the high degree of freedom provided by the task force, it is even more necessary to discipline yourself with self-discipline and responsibility. It is impossible for the task force to "let itself go" and play its role. Because of this, those educated young people clamor to form a task force, but they often resist it in real life. It requires a high degree of self-discipline.
However, the biggest limitation of the task force structure is its size. The task force works well when there are few members. The natives' hunting party consists of seven to fifteen people. The number of sports teams such as football team, baseball team and hockey team is also roughly the same. If a task force is too large, it will be difficult to control. Some of its advantages, such as flexibility and members' sense of responsibility, will be weakened; However, some of its shortcomings, such as lack of clarity, problems in information exchange, and excessive concern about internal mechanisms and internal relations, are more prominent.
Scope of application of task force organization
However, the field that can make the greatest contribution by supplementing functional organizations with task teams may be knowledge work. Knowledge organization (see Chapter 35) can be balanced between "functional departments" as a person's "stronghold" and "task teams" as his "workplace".
Knowledge work is a kind of professional work by definition. Therefore, the transformation from middle management to knowledge makes a group of experts enter the management group not as staff officers but as operators. Some traditional typical functions are being replaced by many new functions. Of course, many new functions can and should be merged. However, although tax experts are often grouped with "financial" personnel, or included in the accounting department or the treasurer department, their work is still different and separate. This also applies to product managers and marketing managers, who also have the same traditional marketing functions; Traditional research and development functions are related to and part of traditional manufacturing functions.
This requires better functional management. We must decide what kind of professionals we need. Otherwise, organizations will use people who are not their own, but those who have expertise will not be used. We must seriously consider what are the key activities that require high professional knowledge, and ensure that high and excellent knowledge can be obtained in key areas. At the same time, we must ensure that other fields will not be completely deprived of knowledge work or only have poor knowledge work.
Professional knowledge must be managed to ensure that it can contribute to the purpose of enterprise establishment. It is necessary to predict today the new professional knowledge that will be needed tomorrow and the new requirements that will be put forward for the existing professional knowledge tomorrow. In other words, there needs to be functional concern for the so-called management development (see Chapter 33).
Professional knowledge talents themselves also need to be cared for and managed. Are they engaged in really important things, or are they wasting their time on small things? Are they doing something they already know how to do, or are they creating new potential or new ability to achieve? Are they being used productively, or just keeping them busy? We must also pay attention to their professional and personal development.
These are all extremely important questions. These questions cannot be answered by checking how many hours a person has worked. They require knowledge of functional fields and real functional management.
There is a lot of knowledge work that will undoubtedly be organized on the basis of strict functions. A lot of knowledge work will be done by individuals who are actually "members of the organization".
However, more and more knowledge workers will have a "functional" stronghold and work with knowledge workers from other functional departments or other disciplines in the task team. The more advanced a knowledge worker is, the more he will work and make his contribution in a cross-functional task team, rather than in his own functional department. Because, the more advanced knowledge, the more specialized it is. And specialized knowledge, even if it is not pure "data", is also incomplete knowledge. It can only be productive if it is combined with other people's knowledge. It can only be effective as an input to other people's decision-making, work and understanding. It can only be a "result" in the task force.
Therefore, knowledge organizations will increasingly have two axes. One is the axis of functional departments to manage people and their knowledge, and the other is the axis of task teams to manage work and tasks. On the one hand, it destroys and destroys the principle of functional system. On the other hand, it saved the principle of functional system and brought it into full play. It definitely requires strong, professional and effective functional managers and functional departments.
The task force is obviously not a panacea as many people who advocate "small groups" and "free-form organizations" say. It is a difficult structure that requires high self-discipline. It has serious limitations and great defects.
However, it is not a temporary expedient measure to deal with non-recurring "special problems", as many managers still think. It is a real organizational design principle. For some long-term organizational tasks such as top management and innovation, it is the best organizational design principle. Moreover, for the functional structure-a large number of production work, whether physical or clerical, especially knowledge work-it is an important and perhaps indispensable supplement. In terms of various possibilities, it is extremely critical to make functional skills play a full role in knowledge organization.
If I were your CEO, I wouldn't allow this to happen. There is not enough reason to separate marketing from the sales department. If you agree to do this this time, then your team members may feel that your leadership style is not in tune with themselves, and you have to become a department independently. What should you do? Then your company will end up with one person and one department.
Finally, if your enterprise is a state-owned enterprise, it doesn't matter what you do. State-owned enterprises don't need management at all.