Organizational Design: Creating Competitive Advantage

In order to sustain themselves, organizations need to compete for scarce resources both in input and output markets. Because of this organizations need to create some kind of competitive advantage. In this business and management course, suitable for managers and leaders in midsize to large organizations, you will learn the principles of organizational design and how design elements can be leveraged to gain competitive advantage. We will discuss various organizational structures and how an effective organizational design can help achieve a company’s goals and objectives in a sustainable manner. Since organizations involve collaborative activities, you’ll also learn how to create suitable control systems, decision-making processes and culture and reporting relationships to ensure that the efforts of a diverse set of employees are suitably coordinated to achieve the organizational purpose.

• Interrelationship between an organization’s strategy and structure
• Effective use of control systems
• How to achieve Competitive advantage through different designs
• Structural alternatives such as functional, divisional and matrix
• Structural tradeoffs such as centralization, formalization and complexity
• How to manage structural change

• Basic knowledge of business is necessary and some experience in being part of an organization or running an organization is ideal.