Case -Wildlife Entertainment: Organizational Structural Archetypes Yogendra

|Section C|
P39176
Organisational design can be complex, involving many different levers. But at its
roots are a few fundamental formal structures as functional, matrix, and divisional. This case
tracks the early history of a start-up company in the mobile entertainment industry that
rapidly expands and needs to consider the pros and cons of these various archetypes of formal
structure. It is told as a story of a young company that faces organisational design challenges
as it grows. The structure was informal and fluid. Initially, there were 40 people, with only
two levels. This gave an advantage to Wildfire to achieve their tasks and objectives
efficiently. The focus was on innovation, bringing a new application to the market faster, this
was achieved as per its structure. The industry was growing at a fast pace, this was lead to an
increase in the number of projects, which lead to an increase in pressure among employees
because of workload. This lead to an increase in employees, with the same informal structure
it became difficult to manage and costs increased. This had an adverse effect on the
coordination and teamwork of the employees. Increase in complexity of work led to a
decrease in efficiency which led to a rise in problems in the organization.

To resolve these issues, the company hired Elizabeth Rankin as a consultant. At first, she
recommended hierarchal, functional organizational structure. Roles of the employees were
clearly defined; there was task clarity, which led to increased efficiency. Each function had a
head manager and then a variety of roles and levels within which people could be developed
and promoted. R&D type jobs were created and core support functions such as Finance and
Marketing were crafted. This system brought greater clarity to work and worked well for a
few years. The issue with this structure was speed. Decision making became slow as
moderately important decisions had to be passed through long vertical, seven-level
hierarchies.

To overcome this, the company adopted a matrix structure. In this, teams were formed on the
basis of products and team members needed to report to their respective departments. This
was done so that employees could get a complete view of the major product line keeping in
view the efficiency and technical know-how in the organization. There were unclear roles
during decision making. Politics was started inside the organization which was very bad for
the organization. There were different market segments like gaming, animation and learning
tools these were growing in different ways. So, a divisional structure was adopted wherein,
the company divided itself in a product line and each product had its own departments. Three
broad divisions were – Game development, animation and movie development and learning
tools along with a fourth division which comprised of Finance, HR, IT, Legal. In my opinion,
restructuring frequently is not a good idea. It may cause some problems as the employees
have to continuously adjust to changing requirements and can cause inefficiencies in the
organization. So, the structure should not be changed at once and it should evolve gradually.
The originality and informal structure of the organisation should have been maintained.