What impact can organisation structure; technology have on the behaviour and performance of teams?

Question

What impact can (a) organisation structure; (b) technology have on the behaviour and performance of teams? Discuss positive and negative effects, illustrating your answer with examples.

Answer 1

Hopefully, I can share in your good grade...

Organizational structure can affect the behavior and performance of teams by either helping or hindering how information passes from person to person and from team to team. Here are positive examples:

Having a clearly defined hierarchy lets me know exactly whom I report to, and if everyone in the team ultimately submits their findings to a manager, that manager can digest and report the summary of said information to his/her manager. Coming from one voice, fed by the imperical and experiential data of several others, the information is more likely to be accurate and true than that of several people straggling in to individually give their two cents.

I can e-mail anybody in my team at any time, and they can e-mail me. It's quick, it's efficient, and it wastes little time burying the information in useless pleasantries.

In any hierarchy, a silo mindset develops. In order to get anything changed, I have to so impress my boss that he tells his boss, who tells his boss... and about nine levels above me, somebody has the power to freakin' change things that may or may not be working. Needless to say, information almost never reaches all the way from my level to the top, so things stay pretty much as they are. For better or worse... and the morale problems caused by being effectively ignored are small compared to how much this can hurt a giant, slug-like corporation that can no longer act and react like a hungry young start-up.

The fact that each e-mail feels tiny makes everybody think they can send you ten a day. Very few people would call on the phone more than once or twice in a given week (unless they had something seriously important and urgent), but I know people who get over 100 e-mails a day (and for some of them, that's a low number). Sometimes these are nonsense, sometimes they're redundant, sometimes they're just FYI... but everybody thinks their message is important enough to be read, remembered, and possibly responded to. This can really hurt one's social network, if people automatically assume you're ignoring them.

I could go on for a long while, but I'm sure that's enough.