What you’ll learn to do: Describe the various organizational structures and their history

When the US economy went from the general store on the corner to the boom of manufacturing and the Industrial Revolution, there was a need to look at businesses differently. Suddenly, there were not two or three employees in a business, there were hundreds. There was not just one group of tasks to complete, there were dozens.

Just as we looked to our team members to decide how to motivate them and make them more productive, we began to study organizational structure to determine how that had an influence. Organizational structure brings together Taylor’s ideas of work specialization, Fayol’s ideas of chain of command, and Weber’s bureaucracy to add to the productivity and efficiency of business.