MHR 505 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Valve Corporation, Role Conflict, Departmentalization

• School: Ryerson University
• Department: Human Resources
• Course: MHR 505
• Professor: Jonathan Hughes

Document Summary

Valve corporation has a flat, organic organizational structure to leverage the creative and entrepreneurial potential of its 300 employees. Division of labour and patterns of coordination, communication, workflow, and formal power that direct organizational activities. Relates to many ob topics (job design, teams, power) Division of labour: results in specialization, separate jobs for different people, improves work efficiency. Coordination of work: value of division of labour is limited to ability to coordinate that work, coordinating work can be costly. Three coordinating mechanisms: informal communication, formal hierarchy, standardization. All firms use informal communication for coordination. Easiest in small firms, but technology extends its use in large firms. Larger firms also apply informal communication through: liaison roles, integrator roles, temporary teams. Formal hierarchy: direct supervision, assigns legitimate power to manage others, necessary in most firms, but has problems. Standardization routine behaviour/output: standardized processes (e. g. , job descriptions, standardized outputs (e. g. , sales targets, standardized skills (e. g. , training)