Taha Yayci 2407716

EMBA 5203 Organizational Theory Midterm November 9, 2020
Dr. S. Nazlı Wasti Pamuksuz

I hereby declare I am aware that cheating is a crime and that I have not received unauthorized aid
on this exam. Name and Signature TAHA YAYCI
INSTRUCTIONS: The exam is 130 minutes. You may use your books and notes. Write clearly and
justify your answers. Pay attention to using course concepts where applicable. All questions have
equal points. Good luck!
1. Answer the following questions based on the Qantas case provided.

a. What are the general and specific environmental forces Qantas is facing?
General Environmental Forces:

- Capital costs are high (economic forces)
- Cyclical nature of the industry – SARS, bird flu, (environmental forces)
- Cyclical nature of the industry – terrorist attacks (international forces)
- Owned by the government (political forces)
- International air routes are planned by agreements between countries (international
forces)
- Ultra-Long range aircrafts (technological forces)
Specific Environmental Forces:

- Wildly fluctuating demand (customer forces)
- It is not a must to have purchase, just optional (customer forces)
- Owned by the federal government (governmental forces)
- Constant downward pressure on prices (competitors forces)
b. Qantas is using which principles you have learned for managing the environment?
- About the terrorist attack that created uncertainty in the environment, Qantas made a
merger with Australian Airlines and decreased the uncertainty by increasing the richness
and decreasing the complexity.
- They decreased the political effects of the environment by hiring a politically savvy chief.
- Qantas tried to be more organic at pricing strategy and developed an information
management system to manage a yield management plan.
- Qantas combined some departments and made the structure more flat to increase the
communication between departments doing related tasks. This decreased the
dependencies between departments and also for external suppliers, and improve the
profit performance.
- Computerized systems has been developed to increase the integration between
managers of different departments. So more of the work become automated.
- With Australian Airlines and Jetstar, the global structure of the company evolved to
customer/market based structure to lower the costs with full service.
- Technology is used to make the structure more mechanistic and also for creating new
networks to decrease the costs. As using ultra-long range aircrafts opened new
opportunities as well as decreasing the connecting flights and cost.
This study source was downloaded by 100000874786067 from CourseHero.com on 12-17-2023 13:45:59 GMT -06:00
https://www.coursehero.com/file/92714585/taha-yayci-2407716docx/
2. A B2C organization is in its seventh month of online operations selling accessories like tripods,
lamps, cameras, headphones, and microphones for online meetings. The founders had
stumbled upon an inexpensive Chinese supplier of such equipment so they invested all their
savings and took out a loan in order to finance the inventory and additional servers and
software needed to go into business. By March of its first year of operations, an unexpectedly
large number of orders reached the company. The founders devoted their full energies to
getting product where it needed to be in time for the beginning of the academic spring
semester. At all hours of day and night, they could be found doing anything from the job of the
IT specialist they had recently hired, to the job of the packaging staff. As this company grows
and takes on new customers, what would you expect to happen as they go through Greiner’s
stages of growth?
They are at the stage of “growth through creativity”. Everything is informal, everybody doing every
task for the good of the company. The organization is flat and simple. There is no specialization. There
will be a “crisis for leadership” and followed by “growth through direction”. After getting new
customers, there will be a need for a better organization structure. There will be differentiation and
specialization, resulting in a functional organization structure (preferably). The organization will get
taller with some rules for tasks. After that, there will be a “crisis for autonomy” and “growth through
delegation”. It means that the organization will get taller, there will be a change in the organizational
structure and maybe a product division structure or a multi-division structure will be built. The
managers will get their authorities to decide at some levels, meaning the company will be
decentralized. Then “crisis of control” will come to place and this will be followed by “growth through
coordination”. The managers will become far away from common goals of the company and the
communication will decrease. This may result as the top management to change the organization to a
more centralized structure again. But in any case, the upper management will handle the
coordination between the lower managers to achieve company effectiveness. At this stage the
exploitation gets more credit than exploration, I think. The final crisis will be “crisis of red tape” and
followed by “growth through collaboration”. The bureaucracy will dominate the company and
flexibility will be vanished. Matrix organization structure can be constructed to increase the efficiency
of the company.
As a summary, the organization is in the most flat, non-differentiated position. After getting new
customers, more employees will get on the board and there will be a functional structure like
packaging, IT, sales, marketing etc and centralized decision making will be in place. In the third stage,
there will be decentralization, In the fourth stage, a divisional structure will be constructed as lamps,
cameras, headphones etc. In the fifth stage, matrix structure can be chosen to be constructed.
If that B2C organization could not face and solve each problem it would not survive in a competitive
environment. While the company is differentiated from its Chinese competitor by quality, the
competitiveness of the environment makes the company shut down.
3. Answer the following questions based on the Aquarius Advertising Agency case in your
coursepack (in ODTUClass):
a. What kind of a structure does Aquarius have? What role does an account executive have in the
present structure?
The corporate management is a functional structure and the account executives are like
customer/market based structure. Coming together it looks like a functional structure with cross-
functional integrators. And the Accounts department is the integrator department. In fact the
account executives core job is to communicate with the customer, determine the needs of them and
convey these to the related specialist.
b. Can the problems at Aquarius be solved without a major reorganization? Explain your answer.
Problems: The direct communication between the specialist and the customer prevents the account
executives to manage the client. Rapid turnover in the major accounts, forces company for re-
organization. In the marketing department all specialists claim they have to do their own thing and
communicate directly with the customer. Company should be more flexible to fashion changes and
response faster to clients’ request to not to lose them.
Solutions: Direct communication between clients and the specialist should be prevented. The
environment is unstable because complex and dynamic (unstable) so the environment is uncertain.
There should be an organic organization to survive. The integration between the departments should
be improved. The minimum chain of command should be established and the responsibility matrix
should be well defined.
The answer to the question is YES. Matrix organization structure should be constructed. The top part
should consist of a functional structure like Marketing, Finance, etc. The left part of the matrix should
be product structure. There are various products in the organization and uncertainty in the
environment. So matrix structure would be a good choice to handle the unstability of the
environment with various products. Although matrix organization violates the unity of command
principle, the employees are not mediocre people, they are well trained and specialized people that
can handle and manage two managers respectively. As a result, the departments will be more
integrated and improved communication will be between the departments, and of course the
account executives will be the only one that communicates with the client.
Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

Taha Yayci 2407716

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Taha Yayci 2407716

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

EMBA 5203 Organizational Theory Midterm November 9, 2020

Dr. S. Nazlı Wasti Pamuksuz

1. Answer the following questions based on the Qantas case provided.

General Environmental Forces:

Specific Environmental Forces:

You might also like