Question

Describe the organizational structure of Target? What are the different organizational structure types?

Answer 1

Target is an American retailing company providing a variety of products from fashionable clothing to everyday essential items such as toiletries and cleaning items. Target has a wide organizational structure through which it delivers amazing products at an affordable price.

Target's organizational structure is a functional type of structure and starts with CEO. Then it breaks down into different positions. After the CEO, there comes Executive Vice President. After that position, Target is broken down into four regions thrioughout the United States. Each region is managed by regional president. Then it breaks down regions into groups, districts and lastly individual stores. Each group consists of a group director and support staffs such as HR people and specialists in each department. Then there are marketing staffs for each region and Community Relation officers to establish and maintain a cordial relationship with the public. Then there are technology experts and managers for supervising distribution in various outlets.

There are three different organization structure types:

Functional Structure: Functional structure is formed to group each part of the organization as per its purpose. For example, there may be marketing group/department, sales department, production department, purchase department and so on. This type of structure is more appropriate for small businesses in which each department can depend on the expertise of its workers. But in functional structure type, coordination and communication between departments are limited to the departments only.

Divisional Structure: Divisional structure is particularly adopted by larger companies that covers a wide geographic area or that have many smaller organizations within the main group to include different types of products or market areas. This structure is more beneficial towards the attainment of needs more rapidly and more specifically. A divisional structure has a demerit that is, there arise communication problem because employees in different divisions are not working together. The cost of this type of structure is very high. Smaller businesses can use divisional structure on a low scale, for example, different sales teams can be assigned to control different geographic areas.

Matrix Structure: Matrix structure is a composite of divisional and functional structure. This type of structure is applicable in large multinational companies. This type of structure is good for the multinational companies because it uses the power and talents of two groups. But it has one demerit, that is, it can create power struggles as there are two different structural groups are involved in the management process.