Snapchat's Organizational Structure

Although Snapchat’s secrecy and current organizational structure hasn’t affected the company’s growth yet, I believe that its teams’ set up does not reflect optimally successful teams. Snapchat’s organizational structure has led to ingroups, turnover, and dissastified employees. The team’s lack of success can be attributed to the creation of inefficient teams, the development of subcultures, and physical separation.
The creation of the teams can be seen as a contributing factor for Snapchat’s below optimal success. There are three factors that help to determine the effectiveness and successfulness of the creation of teams: context, compositon, and process (Foulk, Chapter 10, p.12). The context factors of team success play the largest role in Snapchat’s situation. Context factors in team success consist of adequate resources, leadership and structure, climate of trust, performance evaluation and reward systems (Foulk, Chapter 10, p.12). Snapchat’s team’s are not optimally successful because of the leadership and structure and the climate of trust within the organization. From the case, employees
Evan Spiegel’s core value of secrecy has created problems with spread of internal information. Employees have inconsistent information and are often the last to know about new products or company developments (Lee, p.3). The subcultures within Snapchat hurt the cohesiveness of its teams in addition to forming ingroups and outgroups. As CEO, Spiegel has created ingroups by hosting small group employee meetings called “Council” (Lee, p.3). These meetings foster a sense of seclusion and privilege, which creates a separation among teams within the organization, ultimately contributing to the lack of trust, communication and success of the