Bureaucracy Case Study

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Recommended: Organisational structure its impact on organisation

Along with the development of organisations and corporations over the past 200 years, organizational behaviour and the associated concepts have undergone revolutionary changes. From Adam Smith (1776) to Peter Ferdinand Drucker in the 21st Century, numerous experts have proposed and advocated various concepts and ideas on organisational behaviour and associated practices. For example, Smith (1776) has noted that the division of labour, and this method and idea has been accepted and adopted in different kinds of organizations during those periods. Next, the Principles of Scientific Management was proposed by Frederick Winslow Taylor in 1911, which has focused on how to maximize the benefits to staff, mangers and society, moreover, it also developed …show more content…

It is also a fact that Nokia was the first to develop a whole range of new smart phones in the world. However, they were too big and inefficient; thence Nokia was subsequently replaced by other companies. Afterwards they tried to reverse the decline in the smart phones market share and finally it loses nearly the whole smart phones market share in 2014. Many considered Nokia as the largest corporation and a pioneer of mobile phones maker. The company had funds and human resources to make continuously grow. However, as mentioned above, this company became too huge to be inefficient, thus they were not able to change their strategies and policies, even their corporate structure and culture immediately. Therefore, Bureaucracy is one reason why they were surpassed by other corporations and finally have no any chances to turn over the market share of smart phones. Based on O’Brien (2010), in Nokia, Bureaucracy suffocated innovation and development. Actually, Nokia prepared the prototype of touch-screen and internet functionality a couple of years before iPhone was introduced by Apple. According to The New York Times (2010), Hakkarainen (former manager at Nokia) indicated that Nokia did not pursue the innovation, but was paying more attention on research and development cost. Furthermore, he also noticed that the organizational structure of Nokia is extremely sophisticated and enormous. Hence, these factors resulted in dilemmas about communication and cooperation with different departments. For example, when he was a manager in department of Marketing, if some staff offers one idea or proposal to him, if this proposal involved interdepartmental decision, he had no any power to make a decision and could not collaborate with another department manager immediately. The bureaucratic structure necessitated the submission of this proposal to the general manager, and a wait

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