Apparel Industry Management

Apparel Industry Management 3(3+0)

Lesson 11 : Organizational Structures

Adaptive Structure

This type of structure is designed as to cope with the unique nature of undertaking and the situations in the organization. There are two types of adaptive structure they are:

1. Project organization
2. Matrix organization

1. Project organization:
   This type of organization is suitable when an organization undertakes specialized work for a particular period as one time operation. In order to deal with such situations organizations develops a unit which is specially designed to accomplish such project works without disturbing the routine jobs of the organization. The organizations engage their existing employees on deputation basis to deal with a particular project and then that particular executive resumes to his parent department after the completion of the project. The advantage of such organizations is that it does not disturb the regular work of the organization. It enables the better control over the project activities because the managers enjoy the authority to function the projects effectively. But at times these organizations spoil the stability of the various departments as the personnel are shifted for the sake of the project and thus disrupt the basic functioning of the parent department.

Matrix Structure
When it comes to matrix structure, the organization places the employees based on the function and the product.
The matrix structure gives the best of the both worlds of functional and divisional structures.





In this type of an organization, the company uses teams to complete tasks. The teams are formed based on the functions they belong to (ex: software engineers) and product they involved in (ex: Project A). This way, there are many teams in this organization such as software engineers of project A, software engineers of project B, QA engineers of project A, etc.
2. Matrix Organization:
   It aims to combine the advantages of autonomous project organization and functional specialization. In this structure functional departments are having full time specialized workers to accommodate and are capable of handling more than one project at a time. This is found suitable as the organization is most of the time engaged in the project activities and the managers are also more in number and can accomplish the project work effectively. It provides for the flexible system of working as it adapts the changes quickly. The demerit of such organizations is that the employees are engaged in dual jobs and are burdened with more work which affects the unity of command at times in the organization.
   Every organization needs a structure in order to operate systematically. The organizational structures can be used by any organization if the structure fits into the nature and the maturity of the organization. In most cases, organizations evolve through structures when they progress through and enhance their processes and manpower. One company may start as a pre-bureaucratic company and may evolve up to a matrix organization.