Advantages and Disadvantages of Functional Structure

Essay topic: Advantages and disadvantages of functional structure. These days, most large manufacturing organizations have a functional structure. The functional structure describes an organizational structure in which the division of work is paramount. Jobs and activities are grouped together. The structure may be divided is various ways, including (among others) production, finance, marketing, sales, and personnel or human resources departments. The functional structure has both advantages and disadvantages. There are five important advantages of the functional structure. Firstly, it provides order and accountability to an organization. Secondly, by creating specific task, the efficiency of the labor needed to accomplish, the task increases. Then, it is easy for the development of professional expertise by clustering specialists in the present function as a single unit. Next, in this structure human resource abilities are constantly nurtured by concentrated tutoring, leadership and guidance. Finally, coordination and specialization of tasks are centralized, which makes producing a large number of products efficient, predictable and inexpensive. On the other hand, the functional structure also has four main disadvantages. The first one is that the lesser interaction between the other departments and people belonging to other departments often lead to a lack of communication, making the organization slow and inflexible. The second one is that the functional structure encourages internal competition or battles among departments which have incompatible goals. Each functional group begins to develop its own orientation toward how the activities of the entire company should be prioritized and these will often conflict with the views of other departments that depend on the group for cooperation and resources. The third one is that separating functions is unlikely to encourage innovations. As the company begins to disperse its activities away from