Organisational design and organisational effectiveness in Ecobank Nigeria Limited in Delta State

Ekakitie (2017) explained that bureaucratic approach has contributions from Henri Fayol who formulated the fourteen (14) principles of management in order to understand the organisational and its structure/ design. He also explained that Max Weber (the doyen of bureaucracy) and Frederick Taylor (the leading exponent of the scientific management theory) laid a solid background of organisational design and formation. Max Weber and Frederick Taylor have a strong believe in the one best way of doing things and the link between efficiency, effectiveness and organisational design. Griffin (2016), in his own view, posited that bureacracy is a type of organisational structure that is based on a legitimate and formal system of authority. In fact, most of the people relate bureaucracy with red-tape, rigidity and passing the buck.

According to Ekakitie (2017), bureaucratic thoery states that good allowance should be given to experience, merit and the ability to perform or execute task rather than favouritism. He also observed that Taylor was emphatic about the exigency of scientific selection as well as training and development of workers and the bureaucratic model recommended the need for clear job responsibilityand specialization so that evaluation of and reward for performance can be easily achieved. Griffin (2016) summarised the ideal bureaucratic approach into five ways:

This is a universally accepted approach of organiszation structure that involves the behaviourists and human relations schools. The best-known behavioural model was the Likert's system model of organisational (Ekakitie 2017). He carried out a research which he pioneered at the Michigan University in which he surveyed a large number of organisationalso as to figure out the factors that make some organisational successful and others less successful. He opined that organisational that adopt and apply the bureaucratic model tend to be less effective than those organisational that largely emphasis group work deevelopment, behavioural as well as social processes in the organisational (Griffin 2016).

Likert (1967) identified system 1 form organisational that is related to an ideal bureaucracy. In this type of organisational, motivational processes are seen to be based on economic factors and interaction processes are restricted and closed. This means that communication is relatively formal and mainly job related. The system 1 is considered to be somewhat rigid and flexible. The behavioural model paralleled the emergence of human relations school of management thought. Likert equally developed a framework that classified organisational in terms of eight important processes: Leadership, commuication, motivation, interactions, decision making, goal – setting, and contol and performance goals.

This is the conversion processes that is utilized to transform inputs like (materials/ information) into outputs like (products/services). Majority of the organisational use multiple technologies. The concept of technology is not limited to assembly lines and machinery, especially as it can also be applied to service organisational. Joan Woodward was the first woman to recognise the link between technology and organisational. She studied one hundred manufacturing companys in Southern England and gathered information about such things as the history of individual organisational, their production processes, their forms and procedures and their financial performance. Although, she assumed a relationship betwwen the size of an organisational and its effectiveness, but the finding of her study did not support such a relationship (Griffin 2016). In Woodward's sample, she also explained that as technology became more complex, especially as the number of management levels increased, executive span of management also increased, as the size of its staff component relatively did. The management supervisory span, first increased and then decreased as technology became more complex mainly because more of the work in continuous and fewer workers were needed but the skills needed in carrying out the job increased. This, technology seems to play a key role in determining organisational design.

Environmental elements and organisational design can be linked in different ways. According to (Griffin 2016) environment organisational linkages was widely recognized for the first time by Burns and Stalker. Their first assignment was to identify two extreme forms of organisational environment: stable and unstable. Thereafter, they studied the organisational design of each type of environment. Their findings revealed that organisational in stable environments (mechanistic) have a different environment than that of the unstable environments (organic). Mechanistic organisational is close to bureaucratic model, which was frequently found mostly in a stable environmentsand it is free from uncertainty. An organic organisational on the other hand was mainly found in unstable and unpredictable environments, characterised by a higher level of flexibility, constant change and uncertainty.

Another factor that affects the design of an organisational is the size of the organisational. Organisational size is the total number of full-time or full-time equivalent workers. A team of researchers at the University of Aston in Birmingham, England is of the opinion that Woodward had failed to find a size – structure relationship (which was her original expectation) because most of the organisationals she studied were quite small. As a consequence, they decided to study wider organisational in order to know how size and technology respectively and jointly affectorganisational design. Their findingsrevealed that technology influence small firms because their activities are centered on technology. While in large firms strong technology-design link broke down mainly because technology is not central to ongoing activities in large organisational (Griffin 2016).

Organisational life cycle is a natural sequence of stages in which most organisational go through as they grow and mature. Griffin (2016) asserted that there is no clear pattern that explain changes in size, but most organisational pass through four distinct stages: the birth stage of the organisational,the youth stage of the organisational, that is the growth and expansion stage of all organisational resources, the midlife stage which is the stage where oganizations experience gradual growth evolving eventually into stability and the final stage of an organisational life cycle is the maturity stage a period of stability. Managers must encounter a number of organisational design issues as theorganisational progresses through these stages. In sum, as organisational passes from one stage to another, it gets bigger, more mechanistic and more decentralized. Thus, an organisational's size and design are clearly linked and this link changes because of the organisational life cycle.

Organisational create structure to facilitate the co-ordination of facilities and to control the actions of its members. The structure is comprised of three components. The first has to do with the degree to which activities within the organisational are broken up or differentiated and it is known as complexity. The second is the degree to which rules and procedures are utilized and it is this component is referred to as formalization, while the third component of structure is centralizationwhere decision-making authority lies.

Complexity encompasses three forms of differentiation: horizontal, vertical, and spatial. Horizontal differentiation has to do with the degree of horizontal separation between units. The larger the number of different occupations within an organisational that require specialized knowledge and skills, the more horizontally complex that organisational is due to the fact that diverse orientations make it more difficult for organisational members to communicate and more difficult for management to coordinate their activities. Vertical differentiation, on the other hand, means the depth of the organisational hierarchy and the more levels that exist between top management and the operatives, the more complex the organisational is because there is a greater potential for communication distortion. It is equallyharder for top management to oversee closely the actions of operatives where there are more vertical levels. Also, spatial differentiation implies the degree to which the location of an organisational’s physical facilities and personnel are geographically dispersed and the higher the level of differentiation, the higher the level of complexity because communication, co-ordination, and control become more difficult.

Formalization refers to the degree to which jobs within the organisational are standardized. If a job is highly formalized, then the position occupier has a minimum amount of discretion over what is to be done, when it is to be done and how it should be done. Employees are therefore expected always to handle the same input in exactly the same way, resulting in a consistent and uniform output. There are explicit job descriptions, lots of organisational rules, and clearly defined procedures covering work processes in organisational where there is high formalization. Where formalization is low, job behaviors are relatively non-programmed and employees have a great deal of freedom to exercise initiative in their work. Besides, in so far as an individual’s discretion on the job is inversely linked to the amount of behavior that is preprogrammed by the organisational, the greater the standardization, the less input the employee has into how his or her work is to be done. Standardization not only eliminates the possibility of employees engaging in alternative behaviors, but it even removes the need for employees to consider alternatives. The degree of formalization can also vary between organisational and within organisational. Certain jobs, for instance, are well known to have little formalization.

In some organisationals, top managers make all the decisions and lower-level managers simply execute top management’s directives. At the other extreme, there are organisational where decision making is pushed down to those managers who are closest to the action. The former case is called centralization and the latter is referred to as decentralization.

The term centralization refers to the degree to which decision making is concentrated at a single point in the organisational. Specifically, it is said that if top management makes the organisational’s key decisions with little or no input from lower-level personnel, then the organisational is seen as centralized. In contrast, the more that lower-level personnel provide input or are actually given the discretion to make decisions, the more decentralized the organisational.