Business Studies: People in Organisations

Businesses can be organised into several departments. Departments group jobs together by their function.

• Finance Department - Looks after money, Prepares final accounts, day-to-day money management.
• Marketing department - Looks after marketing strategy, plans and delivers marketing mix for all products.
• Production Department - Makes stuff. Manufacturing.
• Human Resources Department - Makes sure the business has the right amount of workers with the right skills.

This would be a tall structure: Lots of layers of heirarchy with narrow span of control.(Each manager manages only a few employees.

Benefits: Specialist managers and workers can work in their own area of expertise.

Disadvantages: Difficult for different departments to communicate with each other.

Centralised structures keep authority for decisions at the top.

Advantages:

Leaders have a lot of experience of decision making. Senior managers arent biased towards departments so can make best decisions for business as a whole. Senior managers can make decisions quickly.

Disadvantages:

Not many people are expert enough to make decisions about all departments. De-motivate employee's (removing them from decison-making process).

De-centralised structures share out authority to make decisions.

Advantages: Motivates employee's, expert knowledge of department, quick.

Disadvantage: Not enough experience, Could make mistakes.

Motivation is what makes employee's want to work.

• Workers are most important asset to business.
• Managers want workers to generate as much profit as possible.
• Managers want a high output/ high quality level of work.
• Motivation means anything that makes you work harder or achieve more than you would otherwise. (But its not as easy as it sounds - Hard thing to get right).
• Managers have to push employees to produce more, but not push them to hard that they get fed up and leave. They could use things like financial incentives as a motivator or piece rate (Commission on every product made).
• ALTHOUGH there are also non-financial motivators which make job more interesting! (Job rotation, Job enrichment and teamworking

Employees can aslo be de-motivated by things like: Havent been trained properley, job too stressful, bad working conditions, bad managers or that the employees just dont get on with one another.

Frederick Taylor

Based on the idea that employees are only motivated by money and that they will do the least amount of work they can get away with.

He developed his theories through work-study. (watching how people work. time and motion studies, division of labour (Breaking work down into a lot of small repetitive tasks)

He believed the most productive workers should get paid more and that financial motives are best form of motivation. Workers want more money, be more productive = more cost effective for business.

Disadvantages: Increased productivity=Reduction in quality! therefore supervisors had to be employed to check quality. Ignores the demotivating effect of doing very repetitive work.