McDonalds International - Essay Example

Student Name: Instructor’s Name: Title: Organizational analysis Course: Institution: Organizational analysis Introduction Organizational structure refers to the relationship between the tasks carried out by the organizational members and can be seen in the terms of division of labor, hierarchy, rules, coordination as well as control mechanisms (Robbins & Barnwell 2006). Bureaucratic organizational structures are characterized by; set rules and procedures, a clear hierarchy of authority, written rules specifying an organized, detailed division of labor among other attributes. MacDonald’s is a good example of a bureaucratic organization. MacDonald’s is the world's largest chain fast food restaurants and has restaurants all over the world and hence many people are aware about it. Moreover, MacDonald’s often features in the news, has a website and its details are readily available in the internet and therefore people are able to access a wealth of information regarding the organization. This essay will analyze MacDonald’s as a bureaucratic organization and provide a description of its structural dimensions. In addition, the essay will single out the bureaucratic dysfunctions within MacDonald’s. Bureaucratic Organization Purpose The McDonald’s Corporation is the leading international franchised food service organization and serves about 68 million customers everyday within 119 nations. The organization is operated by either a franchisee or the corporation itself and it principally fast foods and in response to changing consumer tastes, the organization has expanded its menu to consist of salads, smoothies and fruits. McDonald's is simultaneously international and local. The company earns proceeds as an investor within properties, a franchiser of restaurants in addition to being an operator of restaurants. More than eighty percent of McDonald's restaurants international are owned and run by independent local individuals (Andrew 2007). At MacDonald’s the most important thing for the employees is to take care of the customers. If an employee is working within the kitchen, as soon as an order is placed to the kitchen, an employee stops other work, and makes it fast and effectively. If an employee is working as a cashier, as soon as an employee sees a customer approaching the counter, the cashier must drop everything they are doing and attend the customer. When an employee is not attending to customers, one is busy restocking and frequently cleaning. Ordinarily, there is a checklist of daily and weekly items that should be done (Ritzer 2008). According to Max Weber (1864-1920) the main aspects of an ideal bureaucracy includes, fixed division of labor, a clearly defined hierarchy of positions, job applicants chosen basing on their technical qualifications, workers paid through fixed salaries, job position is primary occupation of office holder, workers are promoted according to their achievement, separation of routine employee s from higher authorities, separation of work from home and family life and lastly written rules governing work performance. MacDonald’s is a bureaucratic organization for several reasons. Its production activities and tasks are apt to be exceptionally repetitive at the local shop. The division of labor at MacDonald’s is extreme where the work activities are standard, comparatively small and simple. The responsibilities are clearly defined and so is the authority within the organization. In addition, the management structure is rigid and hierarchical and the communication in the organization is vertical where it flows from the top to bottom and the decision making within the organization is greatly centralized toward the top of the organization. For instance, workers at MacDonald’s are much formalized with clear communication lines and specific job descriptions. This is an advantage to the organization because it enables it to produce a uniform product globally at minimum cost (Ritzer 2008). Structure Centralization is the level to which decision-making authority is concentrated at higher level within an organization. Generally, in centralized organizations, numerous important decisions are made at higher levels of the hierarchy (Robbins & Barnwell 2006). McDonald’s uses a primarily centralized structure to make that control is maintained over its numerous thousands of outlets. The key reason for MacDonald’s centralization is to make sure that all MacDonald’s restaurants serve products of uniform quality. MacDonald’s has over 31,000 restaurants within 119 countries. Even though these restaurants are typically franchises, they all get food and packaging from the same standard vendors. This implies that a MacDonald’s within the United States is just like a MacDonald’s within Russia. At Macdonald’s, all decision-making about menus and marketing are made at the corporate level within the United States. Workers at McDonald’s have limited responsibility to implement initiative. It is an extremely centralized scope of authority (Ritzer 2008). Formalization refers to the extent to which policies, processes, job descriptions in addition to rules are written and clearly articulated. In formalized structures, there are several written rules and regulations and the workers are controlled through the written regulations, so that workers have slight autonomy to decide on a case-by-case basis (Robbins & Barnwell 2006). According to Morgan (2006), culture shapes the organizational character where the organizational culture is determined by the rules and practices within the organization. Therefore, cultural norms in an organization are determined by the organizational values and practices as well. At MacDonald’s, the employees follow a checklist of uniform behaviors in carrying out every task. The idea of culture as a restricted unit with a fixed identity and checklist of attributes is installed within a centralized system of command and control. The food making processes is identical within all MacDonald’s restaurants all over the world. Standards are supposed to be met worldwide and are extremely specific. For instance, one out of two fries should measure 75mm. Therefore, the bureaucratic culture is well-organized for its low-cost analyzer business strategy (Donna 2002). Formalization makes the behavior of the workers more predictable and this leads to consistency of behavior. MacDonald’s human resource management policies are firmly and strictly controlled providing an anarchical power over the workers and deterring the workers from being anti-organizational at anytime. This is manifested by their record of anti-unionist stand (Derdak & Jay 2004).With about fifty new restaurants opening yearly, McDonald’s creates about 3,250 new jobs annually. The organization’s cultural authority is evident within its human resource management policies. McDonald’s has a high labor turnover but accepts this because it recognizes the low level of skill needed by most workers within its restaurants. Basically, work is divided into short job-cycles and custom and rhythmic activities. After some time, most people are likely to become disenchanted with such work; in McDonald’s perspective, they prefer the disenchanted workers leaving the organization and replacing them with more idealistic new ones, since disenchanted workers can impact the business negatively in case their dissatisfaction communicates itself to customers. As a result, the bureaucratic approach makes the MacDonald’s employees to behave that way due to the tightly controlled organizational practices. Even in instances where workers do not share the dominant organizational values, they do not have any option rather than adhere to the organizational norms, because of the high level of regulation within their jobs (Derdak & Jay 2004). Predictability is another aspect in bureaucratic organizations. This is the standardizations and uniformity of services and products. For instance, all MacDonald’s restaurants have the same services globally and the food is prepared using the same procedure in order to come up with a uniform product. Predictability implies that no matter where an individual goes, they will get similar services and products any time they are in MacDonald’s restaurant and its location does not matter. This is also applicable to the employees in the company where their roles and tasks ate extremely repetitive, vastly routine and predictable as well (Ritzer 2008). Complexity refers to the amount of differentiation in existence in different aspects forming the organization. This is often operationalized as the number of diverse professional specializations in the organization. Additionally, organizational complexity can be observed through differentiation within structure, authority, features of employees, products and technologies as well. According to Robbins & Barnwell (2006), complexity is "the degree of horizontal, vertical and spatial differentiation in the organization". MacDonald’s is a bureaucratic organization which has a spatial complexity structure. Spatial complexity entails the extent that an organization has diverse sites within different physical locations. One type of spatial complexity indicates in the acceptance of different cultures within diverse geographical locations. For example, within China, MacDonald’s adds some special items to its menu which are predominantly favored by Chinese people, for example fried rice, green tea and such. The change within MacDonald’s is one type of spatial complexity which could result into a positive or negative outcome. The positive element is that the change can assist MacDonald’s in getting more satisfactions from Chinese customers while the negative aspect is that after the establishment of some regional MacDonald’s stores within different locations, it has become hard for the headquarters to control the organization since the organization is centralized (Andrew 2007. Bureaucratic Dysfunctions Bureaucratic Dysfunctions at MacDonald’s include alienation of the employees. Employees at MacDonald’s dedicate more of their lives to the productive process. And due to the organizational culture of the tasks being accomplished hastily, speed is emphasized over quality in everything that is done at the company. The serving of food is done fast and accordingly the customers should eat fast. This manner is a result of the production logic where time spent away from the productive process is considered as wasted time. As a result, this makes the employees to feel alienated where the bureaucratic alienation reduces the organizational workers to machines with the efficiency goals of the organization and this makes the workers as well as the customers to feel alienated. In addition, the routine and predictability of the tasks at MacDonald’s can create boredom amongst the employees (Donna 2002). The workers at MacDonald’s have limited authority whereby they cannot do anything without first seeking approval from the respective managers. MacDonald’s structure focuses on top-down management; the management communicates to the first-level managers and then the first-level managers inform the workers what to do and the process of accomplishing it. Consequently, the freedom of MacDonald’s staff is limited since the organizational structure is bureaucratic. Thus, the span of control at Macdonald’s is low and only limited number of employees have the liberty of reporting to probably the departmental manager who in line reports to the top management. Obviously, because of centralization, the flow of communication through the hierarchy is poor. Additionally, the process of decision making is slow and inflexible and thus in some events the customer service is slowed because the employees have to inform the management before taking any action regardless of the urgency of the decision (Robbins & Barnwell 2006). Another Bureaucratic Dysfunctions at MacDonald’s is concentration of power where authority is centralized in few individuals within the company. The organizational structure of MacDonald’s has the top managers as the principal authority; as a result decision making in the organization is solely centered on these managers. Basically, centralized organizations have the power and the capacity to make decisions consolidated at the top. Accordingly, both power and the ability to make decisions at MacDonald’s are concentrated at the top (Ritzer 2008). Conclusion MacDonald’s has a bureaucratic structure where its organization structure is highly formalized and the authority is centralized. Generally, the workers at Macdonald’s are given specific jobs descriptions that define their roles and responsibilities. The management structure at MacDonald’s is hierarchical and the communication flow is from the top to the bottom and also decision-making in this organization is centralized toward the top of the organization. Due to its bureaucratic form, the power is centralized and this has resulted to bureaucratic dysfunction in the organization. This is typified by concentration of power at the top and hence the employees are entirely left out in decision making as well as alienation of employees where the tasks at MacDonald’s are routine and the predictability of the tasks creates boredom amongst employees. Lastly, decision making at MacDonald’s is slow since the employees have to seek approval from the management before making any decision. Bibliography Andrew, F., M., 2007, The Oxford companion to American food and drink, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Donna, B., 2002, McDonald’s International: Strategies for Cloning a Golden Egg, St. Norbert’s College, IBEC. Derdak, T & Jay, P., 2004, McDonald's International directory of company histories, St. James Press, London. Jones, G., 2007, Organizational Theory, Design, and Change, 5th Ed., Pearson Prentice Hall, New Jersey. Johnson, G, Scholes, K., & Whittington, R., 2008, Exploring Corporate strategy, 8th Edition, text and cases, Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River. Max, W., 1968/1921, Economy and Society. Translated and edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich,  Bedminster Press, New York. Morgan, G., 2006, Images of Organization, Sage Publications, London. Ritzer, G., 2008, The McDonaldization of Society, Pine Forge Press, Los Angeles. Robbins, S & Barnwell, N., 2006, Organization Theory: Concepts and Cases,5th Ed., Prentice Hall, French’s Forest. Read More