MAN 2100 Module 3 Organizational Structure Assignment Example

Nine Branches, Two Deputies and One Overloaded Director: Analyzing and Redesigning a County Library System's Structure

Student Name

Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, Thomas Edison State University

MAN-2100: Principles of Management

Mentor Name

Month Day, Year

Nine Branches, Two Deputies and One Overloaded Director: Analyzing and Redesigning a County Library System's Structure

Structure is the arrangement of jobs, reporting lines and coordinating links inside an organization (Lumen Learning, n.d.), and Mintzberg (1979) showed how much of an organization's behavior follows from it. The organization examined here is the invented county library system where I run one of nine branches. The system serves about 310,000 residents with 186 employees and a budget of roughly $21 million. Its structure has grown by addition over twenty years rather than by design, and the strains are now visible: decisions wait for the director, branches duplicate work, and system-wide projects stall. The analysis below describes the current structure, evaluates it using course concepts and research, and recommends changes.

The Current Structure

The library is organized as a hybrid of functional and geographic departments. A director reports to an appointed library board. Under the director, two deputy directors divide the branches: one oversees five branches in the county's northern half and the other four in the south. Branch managers supervise their own staff of librarians, clerks and pages. Alongside the branches sit four centralized functional units that report directly to the director: technical services, which buys and catalogs materials for all branches; information technology; finance and human resources; and community programming and outreach.

The director therefore has six direct reports, the two deputies and four unit heads, plus frequent direct contact with branch managers, because the deputies have little authority over budgets and staffing. Most decisions above routine operations, such as approving a new program, moving a staff member between branches or changing branch hours, go to the director.

Evaluating the Structure

Three structural concepts explain the strain. The first is span of control, the number of people a manager directly supervises. The director's formal span of six is moderate, but because deputies cannot decide budgets or staffing, branch managers bypass them, and the director's effective span is closer to fifteen. The second is centralization, the degree to which decisions are made at the top. The library is highly centralized for a system its size: a branch manager who wants to open an hour earlier on Saturdays for a test preparation program needs the director's approval, which can take a month.

The third is coordination across units. Programming is centralized, but branches also design their own programs, so two branches can run nearly identical coding clubs in the same month without knowing it, while a system-wide project like the self-service technology rollout has no clear owner across branches and the IT unit.

Research suggests these features matter for an organization that must keep adapting. Damanpour (1991) pooled findings from dozens of earlier studies and reported that organizations with more specialized and professional staff, more resources and greater internal communication tended to adopt more innovations, while centralization was negatively associated with innovation. A library system facing rapid change in how people use information needs the opposite of its current pattern: more decision authority closer to branches and more communication across them.

The structure also affects staff. Several librarians told me in exit interviews over the past two years that they left for systems where branch staff could launch programs without months of approvals. Turnover among librarians reached 14% last year, and each departure costs the system recruiting time and lost relationships with schools and community groups.

Information flows follow the same pattern. Branch managers learn about system decisions through monthly director's memos, while the director learns about branch problems mainly through complaints. No regular forum exists where branch managers share what is working, so good practices spread slowly or not at all.

Recommendations

Three changes would address the problems without adding cost. First, give the deputy directors real authority over branch budgets within limits set by the director and the board, and over staff scheduling across their branches. That reduces the director's effective span of control and puts decisions closer to the people who carry them out.

Second, group the nine branches into three clusters of three, each led by a senior branch manager who coordinates programs, shares staff during shortages and serves as the first point of escalation. Clusters create a middle level of coordination without a new layer of management, since cluster leads keep running their own branches.

Third, create a standing cross-branch program team, with a programming coordinator, one librarian from each cluster and an IT representative, that plans system-wide programs and owns projects like the technology rollout. This adds a light matrix element: team members report to their branch managers for daily work and to the program coordinator for team projects. Matrix arrangements can create confusion about priorities, so the team's charter will set each member's time commitment, about four hours a week, and give branch managers a say in project timing.

These recommendations shift the library from a centralized structure suited to a stable environment toward a more flexible one, while keeping the functional units that make sense to centralize, such as cataloging and IT infrastructure, where consistency matters most.

Implementation should be gradual. The deputies' new authority can begin with the next budget cycle, the clusters can start with shared program calendars before sharing staff, and the program team can take on one project, the technology rollout, before its charter is extended. Each step will be reviewed after six months by asking branch managers whether decisions are faster and duplication lower. Communicating the reasons for the changes matters as much as the changes themselves, since staff who see clusters as a prelude to closing branches will resist them; the director should present the plan at every branch, answer questions directly and commit that clusters are about coordination, not consolidation.

Conclusion

The library's structure grew without a plan, and its central problem is not the number of boxes on the chart but where decisions are made and how units coordinate. Delegating real authority to deputies, grouping branches into clusters and adding a cross-branch program team would shorten decisions, reduce duplication and give system-wide projects an owner. This analysis will also inform my final project, since my own development as a manager depends partly on taking on the cluster coordination role described here.

References

Damanpour, F. (1991). Organizational innovation: A meta-analysis of effects of determinants and moderators. Academy of Management Journal, 34(3), 555-590. https://doi.org/10.2307/256406

Lumen Learning. (n.d.). Principles of management. Open Educational Resources. https://courses.lumenlearning.com/wm-principlesofmanagement/

Mintzberg, H. (1979). The structuring of organizations. Prentice-Hall.