Organizations

I have had several experiences with organizations, both ones that have undergone change and ones that haven’t. While I was in high school, I was a member of the yearbook staff. I joined the staff my freshman year and by my sophomore year the group had gone through large changes. The group was set up so that it was led by one or two faculty members. These faculty members worked closely with the student editors-in-chief of the group, who then communicated with the section editors, each of whom led a small group of staff members. When I joined the group my freshman year, I was a member of the student staff, and became one of the freshman section editors. At the start of my next year of high school, though, the group experienced an almost-complete loss of student staff members; all members of the student staff who had been a part of the group under the old faculty advisors quit because they didn’t like the method the new faculty advisor had used the previous year. 

This meant that there had to be some serious changes in the group’s organization structure. The group was so under-staffed that there simply weren’t enough people to have an editor and assigned staff for every section of the book. I become one of the new editors-in-chief by default, being one of the most senior staff members. The layer of section editors was removed from the organization structure, and the staff members became a general staff, rather then being divided up into groups with specific tasks.

This new organization method was definitely not as effective as the old method of organization. With the staff no longer being split up to work on different sections of the book, the task of creating a 300 page yearbook became very daunting. The new organization structure also was not as good for staff moral. When a person was assigned a certain section of the book to be in charge of completing during the year, it gave them a sense of ownership and responsibility which encouraged valuable work; once the staff was just set to work on whatever needed to be completed most urgently, the work was of a poorer quality and not as likely to be completed. The review of completed pages became much more limited, and more time was needed to communicate with and teach the staff members because they no longer were able to work closely with an experienced member. 

All around, I learned that it can actually be very beneficial to have multiple layers of structure. I have learned in previous economic courses that one of the reasons that diminishing returns to scale occurs is the inefficiency that comes with the many layers of management that a very large organization requires. My experience has shown though, that at least to a certain point, having a layered organization structure can be very beneficial to the overall productiveness of the group, especially when the people managing others have strong communication with the main leadership.

Although transaction costs usually only look at the costs between institutions, not inside of them, under the new organization of this group, the transaction costs for the relationship between members increased. With the middle layer of the organizational structure removed, the top editors and faculty advisors were given the job of assigning projects to and checking in on the staff members. This change was another large factor in slowing down the productivity because of the time it took.