New Business Organization Trends

Organizational Trends

Organizations are, above all, defined by the people that work within them, and by the shared purpose they try to achieve. Understanding this is fundamental in the the comprehension of the organizational models that are developed and used during a specific moment of time, and how they change in other to fulfill new and different necessities.

Organizations nowadays are shifting their models for them to be comprehensive to the people and the way they now work. In the last decades, we have seen an enormous change and continued development in the technologies through which people communicate and work, hence organizational models had to adapt in order to make use and take advantage of the new technologies, instead of obstructing or obtaining negative consequences as a result of their use. Not only technology has evolved through time, people that work at the organizations in this moment of time are very different to those that worked in the same places several years ago; their values, their ideas, and the way they relate to each other are not the same, and so, the way organizations work, has also evolved in other to keep up with the rapid change this generation is living.

To understand the changes organizations have gone through, we should first analyze the way they used to work. The characteristic that defines the way this past organizations worked is hierarchy. Organizations used to be shaped as a pyramid that had fewer people at the top levels in charge of decision making, and much more people at the bottom levels whose only job was to accomplish the tasks that the people above handed them. It was shaped that way in order to maintain an easily recognizable status quo, which was important in those times. Organizations continued to work that way for several years and the problems arose when markets started to change quickly and when competition started to act as a threat for them. As a consequence of how the information flowed in this model, innovation was very difficult to achieve, adding that to the fact that all the bureaucracy that people had to undergo in order to walk through all the layers the organization had, made it slow and very difficult to react and adapt to new market situations.

As a result of the challenges that hierarchy bring to organizations, one of the most important trend nowadays is the implementations of flatter systems that eliminate many of the obstructions in the flow of communications, allowing employees to take decisions and also propose ideas that solve difficult managerial problems. An organization can have a different amount of “flatness”, depending on it’s size and the way way people interact with each other. There are completely flat organizations in which people do not hold any titles and they have no managers in charge of the, instead, they can decide the project