Principles of Management
Assignment 3
( Pfizer Company )
Noura AlMoajil
ID#201102025
Mr. Wael Zaraket
Section: 202
1) Describe and evaluate what Pfizer is doing.
Pfizer is a global pharmaceutical company, their word depend on
researches, developing strategies and innovate. They were looking for ways to
be more efficient and effective. Pfizer realized that their workers spend more
time in business researches, data analysis and doing other things such as
Googling and making PowerPoint slides, so basically they are spending more
time on menial tasks rather than knowledge work. The results of the statistics
show that Pfizer employees spend around 20 – 40 % on their support work. On
the other hand, 60 – 80 % spend on knowledge tasks. This issue included both
low and high level employees. Thus, they searched for many methods until
they came up with a great solution, it was by Jordan Cohen, the company’s
senior director of organizational effectiveness. They agreed on the solution
where the employee can click the OOF button ( office of the future ) in
Microsoft outlook and then they will automatically be connected to an out
sourcing company, and a worker in India will receive the request and assigns
it to the team. The team leader will call the employee to clarify the request.
After that the team leader will send an email about the cost specification for
the requested work and finally Pfizer employees decide if they will accept it or
not. The advantages of this method is that the time spent on analysis of data
and menial tasks has been cut half. In addition of the impressive financial
benefits they received.
2) What Structural implication-good and bad- does this approach
have? (Think in term of the six organizational design
elements).
The OOF ( office of the future ) was a successful decision and had a great
benefits of this solution. Pfizer were able to connect with all their offices
around the world, and the staff can easily communicate and share information
with each other and offices from all over the world. This organization
structure follows six organizational design elements which are:
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Division of work: which means divide job into different part
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Departmentalization: it is putting specialists together in departments under
the direction of a manager.
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Hierarchy development: a worker have to request to its upper level and
when the worker receives the permission he can start to assign a team to
do the work.
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Authority, Responsibility and Delegation: The authority and responsibility
of upper level are higher than the lowest level workers.
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Centralization Vs. Decentralization: Pfizer decentralized more than
centralized, by using Microsoft outlook, they can connect with another
employee of the organization of different places around the world.
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Coordination: it is the process of combining the activities of separate
departments in order to reach the goals effectively. Pfizer employees can
easily coordinate because t=of the OOF method that helped them connect
all their offices together.
3) Do you think this arrangement would work for other types of
organizations ? why or why not?
In my opinion I think this method will be successful for organizations similar
to Pfizer who their work requires a lot of researches and documentations, so
basically this arrangement would work for large companies who have
branches all around the world because they are doing their work globally, and
they need to have a way to reduce the waste of time. So this arrangement is
definitely not for small ones, because they don’t have many branches around
the world to connect with them and they aren’t working globally so in my
opinion I think they don’t need it at all.
4) What role do you think organizational structure plays in an
organization’s efficiency and effectiveness?
The organizational structure means the ways of organizing the work and
people to accomplish different activities to reach the goal of the organization.
Managers should consider the organizational structure as an important part to
achieve the goals. It effects the efficiency and effectiveness in the
organization. Organizational structure can play a great role in efficiency and
effectiveness in many ways:
A good organizational structure can:
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increase the efficiency and effectiveness of an organization
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increase the management process of an organization so it makes it more
efficient and effective.
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Identifies the goals and show the purpose of the organization
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Can reduce the cost of different activities and increase the experience of
the workers which makes the organization more effective and efficient.