Departmentalization: Barn's And Noble Book Store

4-16. The type of departmentalization Sarah is using to group her employees is functional departmentalization. Sarah oversees three individuals who are divided into different job responsibilities throughout the Barn’s and Noble university bookstore. One of her employees oversees logging the products into the inventory system, another employee is responsible to check if the order of items is correct, and another employee is responsible for unpacking the products and stock them in their designated area. Sarah herself is responsible for signing the invoice and forwarding it to the bookkeeper. This shows that each employee has their own specific job that they must do to make sure that the store is running smoothly.
4-17. The strengths of

this grouping are: 1) Since the work is divided among different people, it is easy for them to focus on their own job. This helps them to have more knowledge of their own responsibility or job and they can come up with ideas to improve the business or how to make the business better. 2) if there is a change or additional responsibility that is assigned, then there are different people to share that work load. This will help take the work stress of someone that would’ve had to do all that work. 3) During the decision-making process, the contribution from each person will help eliminate any biases. This is a key factor for running the business smooth with satisfied and happy employees.
The weaknesses of this grouping are: 1) Assembling the right group and putting each person at the right job could be challenging and time consuming. 2) The employees might loss interest or get bored doing their job every day. 3) The supervisor might sometimes find it difficult to assign equal weight of work for each person working. This might bring a problem of fairness between the employees.
4-18. I would also go for fundamental departmentalization. I would group the people according to the divisions in store same as how Sarah grouped them. I would assign one group to work on the cash register, that group would also take the responsibility of cleaning and organizing the area around the counter to have an organized area. Another group would have the responsibility recovering items around the store that customers left at a place that they don’t belong too. This would make sure that the store is organized at all time and nothing is missing. The most important thing I would do is keep rotating the shifts and give employees different responsibilities. This would give the groups to experience what other group’s jobs and responsibilities. This would keep the employees from getting bored doing the same thing for a long time and give them a learning experience where you get the opportunity to learn the store inside out.