Organizational Behavior

Designing Work Organizations

Appex Corporation case study

Submitted by:

11 November,2016

1. What were the challenges that Shikhar Ghosh faced when he joined Appex Corporation you agree with his analysis of control and coordination?

Appex was a small but rapidly growing company and by the time Shikhar Ghosh joined Appex, it was changing from ‘’entrepreneurial” to chaotic and there were a lot of challenges in coordinating and controlling the activities of the organization.

The key problem facing Shikhar Ghosh upon arriving at Appex is the chaotic condition of the

company’s current structure. What was once a tight-knit group of employees is now a group of

people with no clear-cut job responsibilities or work ethic. He reports that “Everybody just did

what they felt like. For instance, customer service people were supposed to start at 8:00 AM.

They wouldn’t arrive until 10:00 AM, but they would work until 2:00 AM. Everybody did things

on their own time, and the attitude toward the customer was-“we’ll call you back.”  

Culture at Appex was very informal and fluid. That means, everybody does whatever he/she wants to. Thus there is an inherited mindset of flexibility and casualty built in people. No financial planning is done, expenses are not tracked and maintained.

But with increase in size and volume of customers and orders, company could not handle increase in demand. To handle these issues, structure requires for a change with people understanding their responsibilities and act accordingly. Appex needed a system of accountability and structure. To act in this direction, Shikhar Ghosh need to formalize procedures and do the proper planning for the short term and long term goals including immediate issues, such as who should attend which meetings, how to pay people and how to begin employees on a career path with properly defined areas of responsibility.

Another bigger challenge is to convince the existing employees for the formal culture as it would not be easily adopted by any of them, as they would feel it would more of a restriction to them.

1. Evaluate the importance of each structure changes he implemented? How important were they? What problems did each structure address? What problems, in turn, did each structure create?

The environment inside Apex was turning from entrepreneurial to chaotic and as the new CEO of this rapidly growing company, Shikhar had the responsibility to align the structure and activities of employees towards common goal of the company.

To Address these issues, Shikhar Ghosh implemented various new structures.

He started with some Innovative Structures at first below are listed the same:

Circular Structure

Circular structure is expanding from the center, with the highest management at the center and middle management in the middle layers of the circle and the Individual employees at the outer most edge. The main intention of this implementation is to remove hierarchal structure, and enable free flow of information between employees and the Organization environment.

But this structure could not work because it is unable to address the following issues:

• Employees were not able to relate to the structure, they were totally unfamiliar. Also the new hires were lost in this structure as it does not define clearly the roles and responsibilities hold by an individual. Various important questions about the Authority, decision making power, performance evaluation remains unanswered

• Another reason is the mentality developed amongst the people “Customer is enemy”.

• Final reason this structure could not work is the shift of employees working style from a responsive one to a planning one. This is not a change that can be built in a day.

To overcome the fall backs of this structure, Shikhar implemented Horizontal Structure

Horizontal Structure

It is the traditional vertically organized chart which employees did not accepted. Reason though not stated in the case, but could be prevailing mindset of the people about the flexible work culture. Thus they may not be able to bear this sudden shift to traditional culture.

Hierarchical, Functional Culture

The functions are organized in teams: there are various teams based on their functions like Sales & Marketing Team, Development and Services Team, Engineering and Technology Team, An operations Team, Finance Team, HR Team and Administration team.

Various challenges that Ghosh faced while creating this structure includes clear classification of roles in a team, head should be at team level or global team. Also this structure builds a great deal of task completion of the company. Focus on sales is regained and a system of accountability is built in place. This structure, with one head of each department reporting into him reduces the level of hierarchy,

Various Challenges that are faced with this structure are:

• Fact that hierarchy is minimized is displeasing to directors.