J & J

You will respond to the posting to one of your peers with your personal suggestions: What have you learned from their post? What suggestions for improvement to the post?

I’ll add in my post and also the other students post

ANSWER

Post-Response-Organizational Structure

I have learned that Johnson and Johnson has a decentralized organizational structure. However, the post needs to change the description of a decentralized organizational structure. A decentralized organizational structure is where the senior management delegates some authority to the junior and middle-level staff within the organization (Fulton and King, 2021). Decentralization means that different stakeholders rather than one person make decisions. Mr. Weldon stated that decentralization within Johnson and Johnson had offered more power and autonomy to the low-level staff, which has allowed innovation and quick decision-making.

Regarding the benefits of a decentralized organization, the post has highlighted the benefits stated by Mr. Weldon. These include the opportunity to grow and develop people in the business by allowing the local management to run business operations. Another benefit is having people with different skills working together to come up with ideas, such as having employees from each business come together to develop a new product. Weldon gives an example of how the local leaders in Japan manage the local company. The local leaders have a strategy of meeting the needs of the government and the market. Relatively, they have more knowledge about the consumer and market, which facilitates the growth of the business.

I have also learned that decentralization makes it challenging for organizations to coordinate and control their operations. The structure fails to give the high-level management much control as they would have within a centralized organization. For instance, the local management in Japan has its plan, which may deviate from the senior management, thus creating gaps in the goals and objectives of the company. Coordination is a major challenge since it’s difficult to bring everyone on board. For instance, Mr. Weldon describes a situation where they require the pharmaceutical company to work with the medical devices business. However, it’s challenging since every company has its tasks to be completed. Additionally, Johnson and Johnson operates more than 200 companies that have their management, which makes it challenging to coordinate operations.

References

Fulton, J. R., & King, R. P. (2021). The organizational structure of cooperatives: Centralization versus decentralization of decision-making authority. In Agricultural cooperatives in transition (pp. 103-124). Routledge.