Organizational structures of the multinational Western companies – Doru Claudian Frunzulica

The organizational structure of a company expresses the human, material and information resources involved, as well as the features of the environment where the company runs its business. The organizational structure provides the fundamental support for the management system, and the content and blending of the target system, configuration and functionality of the information and decision system, the management methods and techniques used highly depend on the rationality of the said organizational structures. The success of a company is equally determined by the production structure, namely by the way its operations are designed, as well as by the management structure. The two structures are an integral part of the organizational structure of the company.
As for the international operations, there is a large variety of organizational structures and design models, so that the selection of the most proper solutions depends on a large number of endogen and exogen factors of the company which make their mark on the features of the structural organization. Furthermore, the organizational structures justify to a great extent the way the branches were established.
The targets of the herein article are as follows:
- to examine the traditional types of organizational structures used in running the local and international operations;
- to analyze the advantages and drawbacks of each type of organizational structure, including the conditions which make a certain type of structure preferable to another one;
- to describe the recent, non - traditional organizational models, which are the result of the mergers, alliances of joint venture, keiretsu and chaebol type;
- to explain the modality according to which the organizational features, such as formalization, specialization and centralization, influence the structure and functions of the organization.