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CHAPTER 6 • Organizational Structure and Design 203
And at Penske Truck Leasing, dozens of business processes such as securing permits and
titles, entering data from drivers’ logs, and processing data for tax filings and accounting have
been outsourced to Mexico and India. 43

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What Are Today’s Organizational Design Challenges?

6-4 Discuss the Changing the Way Work Is Done

design challenges As managers look for organizational designs that
faced by today’s will best support and facilitate employees doing their
organizations. work efficiently and effectively, there are certain chal-
lenges they must contend with. These include keeping
employees connected, managing global structural issues, building a learning organization,
and designing flexible work arrangements.

How Do You Keep Employees Connected?

Many organizational design concepts were developed during the twentieth century when
work tasks were fairly predictable and constant, most jobs were full-time and continued
indefinitely, and work was done at an employer’s place of business under a manager’s super-
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vision. That’s not what it’s like in many organizations today, as you saw in our preceding
discussion of virtual and network organizations. A major structural design challenge for
managers is finding a way to keep widely dispersed and mobile employees connected to the
organization. The Technology and the Manager’s Job box describes ways that information
technology can help. Tim Kilroy, a salesman for the online advertis-
ing agency Triggit, works remotely on his
computer from a Starbucks coffee shop or his
How Do Global Differences Affect Organizational Structure? home in Massachusetts. With almost half of
his clients located in other countries, Kilroy
Are there global differences in organizational structures? Are Australian organizations uses mobile computing and communication
structured like those in the United States? Are German organizations structured like those technology to stay connected to his company
and to his widely dispersed clients.
in France or Mexico? Given the global nature of
today’s business environment, this is an issue with
which managers need to be familiar. Researchers
have concluded that the structures and strategies
of organizations worldwide are similar, “while the
behavior within them is maintaining its cultural
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uniqueness.” What does this mean for designing
effective and efficient structures? When designing
or changing structure, managers may need to think
about the cultural implications of certain design ele-
ments. For instance, one study showed that formal-
ization—rules and bureaucratic mechanisms—may
be more important in less economically developed
countries and less important in more economically
developed countries where employees may have
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higher levels of professional education and skills.
Other structural design elements may be affected by
cultural differences as well.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/AP Images