Strategic Planning. Organisational Structures

Seminar paper from the year 2018 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, grade: 75, language: English, abstract: This paper covers the essential strategic planning criteria. First, the author analyses the characteristics of different organisational structures. Then, the evaluation of different leadership behaviour theories and the evaluation of how the Investec Bank motivates its employees will be examined. A multifunctional structure is made up of centralised control- hierarchical- and contains separate functional departments. Vertical integration is part of this structure and brings together the operations of the different functional departments - e.g. manufacture and assembly, purchasing resources, retailing as well as distributing. This structure is mainly used for small companies and creates specialisation along functional lines. It is a viable structure as long as the products share common manufacture procedures and technologies and personnel can become highly specialised in their work. However, multifunctional structure is not optimal if the company is developing and makes use of multiple technologies to produce larger product ranges, is moving into new markets and needs to respond to market needs or the firm decides to diversify. Thus multifunctional structure is only valid for small, simple organisations that specialise in their product. For example, General Motors, a car manufacturer, built itself on centralised control over a functionally divisionalised structure and specialised as one of the best car manufacturers.