Bureaucratic Organization In Modern Society

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Bureaucratic organizational structures are no longer relevant in modern times. Discuss. The idea of a bureaucracy was developed by Max Weber, a German theorists in the late 1800s. According to Daft 2005, during that time organizations were managed on a personal, family-like basis and employees were more loyal to a single individual rather than the organization or its mission. Weber’s view is that organizations should be managed on an impersonal rational basis. This organization was called a bureaucracy. A bureaucratic organization is a “structure with highly routine operating tasks achieved through specialization, very formalized rules and regulations, tasks that are grouped into functional departments, centralized authority, narrow spans of control, and decision making that follows the chain of command.” (Robbins 2005). To discuss the relevance of the bureaucratic organizational structures in modern times, one has to examine each of the characteristics as outlined by Robbins above: (a) Specialization – Specialization (or division of labour) is the degree to which organizational tasks are subdivided into separate individual jobs. Simply put, this means that rather than doing an entire job process (example assembling a car) the process is broken down and each employee would be given a particular part of the job…show more content…
In the traditional bureaucratic organization structure, decision-making lies with the top managers and thus lower level workers were not allowed to make any decision pertaining to the organization. They were not able to show their innovative side. Many organizations today are now decentralizing (i.e. pushing decision-making making to lower levels in the organization thereby shifting the decision-making burden from the top managers). Centralization, however, is still relevant in many organizations

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