BUS 374 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: Outsourcing

• School: Simon Fraser University
• Department: Business Administration
• Course: BUS 374
• Professor: Sara Graves

Document Summary

Organizations are social entities that are goal directed and have purpose of structing and coordinating the activity system and are linked to external environments. Structural dimensions provides labels to describe the internal characteristics of an organization, they create basis for measuring and comparing organization. Contextual dimension characterize the whole organizational setting including its size, technology, environment and goals. They describe the organizational setting that will shape and influence structural dimensions. Structural dimensions: formalization is the number of written documents in the organization, specialization is the degree to which organizational task are subdivided into separated job (extensive specialization -> narrow range of tasks. Also called division of labor: hierarchy of authority describes who reports to whom and the span of control (span of control narrow -> hierarchy tends to be tall. Control wide -> hierarchy tend to be short): centralization refers to the hierarchical level that has the authority to make decision.