Organizational Charts

Organizational charts are detailed representations of organization structures and hierarchies. They are typically used to provide both employees and individuals outside the organization with a "snapshot" picture of it's reporting relationships, divisions of work, and levels of management. Obviously, smaller firms—whether they consist of a single owner of a home-based business, a modest shop of a few employees, or a family-owned business with a few dozen workers—are less likely to utilize organization charts, since the information that is gleaned from chart representations is typically pretty self-evident with such businesses. "Small organizations can get along very well without them as long as everyone understands what they are to do and who they are to do it with, " stated James Gibson, John Ivancevich, and James Donnelly in Organizations: Behavior, Structure, Processes. But many consultants and small business owners contend that an organization chart can be a useful tool for growing firms.
Business owners endeavoring to allocate responsibilities, activities, and management authority to various employees also have to make certain that they coordinate the activities of those employees to avoid gaps and/or redundancies in operations and management. "It is helpful to think of organizational design elements as building blocks that can be used to create a structure to fulfill a particular purpose, " stated Phyllis and Leonard Schlesinger in The Portable MBA in Management. "A structure is built by defining the requirements of each individual job and then grouping the individual jobs into units. These units are grouped into larger and larger units and coordinating (or integrating) mechanisms are established for these units. In this way, the structure has been built to support organizational goals and achieve the key factors for success." Ideally, a detailed organizational chart will provide the business owner or manager with an accurate overview of the relationships of