Thursday 5 November 2009

Starbucks Organizational Structure

http://www.theofficialboard.com/org-chart/starbucks

From the website, we can see that Starbucks has a decentralized structure for their company. The advantages of a decentralized structure are input from workforce, speed up the day-to-day decision-making, and more importantly the staff will have higher morale since the will feel more valued since they have some input into decision making. However, there is a greater chance of mistakes since decentralizing authority and responsibility will only work if the empowered person is sufficiently competent.

In the top level of hierarchy, CEO of Starbucks Howard Schultz is showed. He is the person who has the highest responsibility of being in charge of all production workers and he is the person who gives command to the other levels of hierarchy that are below him. In the second level of hierarchy, there other different functional departments within the business, such as CFO, Creative, and International, etc. As one can see, the span of control is huge. The number of staff that is accountable to a the CEO is huge. Also, in the third level of hierarchy, it has listed different geographical region. This shows that Starbucks is organized by geography. This method allows Starbucks to be more aware and responsive to local cultural differences and consumer needs. Starbucks could be listed as a flat structure organizations where there are fewer levels in the hierarchy. Thus, each manager tends to have a wider span of control.

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