Organizational Structure Of Apple Inc | ipl.org

ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE

Apple Inc. has followed different organizational structures and the changes that came depending upon the time frame and when situations called for it. Our objective is to find out the advantages and disadvantages of different organization structure that Apple Inc. has implemented till now.

Apple Inc. has followed a flat structure of organization. Basically this flat structure has encouraged employees to contribute to the decision making process by directly participating in it.
For Example – Steve Jobs always welcomed different idea from his employees.
He rewarded his employees for their out-of-the-box thinking.

The following are the functions that came under CEO:

This segregation is majorly

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Higher unity of command – As mentioned before, Steve Jobs made sure that all the decision passes through him. So the unity of command was on the upper side.

Present Organizational structure of Apple Inc.

The company has a functional structure with 9 different functions. Tim Cook is the current CEO of Apple Inc. Paul Deneve has the responsibility of special Projects and directly Reports to the CEO.

This functional Organization structure is a circular one and centric one with CEO in the middle. (Figure – C) Figure C – Functional Organizational structure of Apple Inc. (2011)

Each and every function of the company caters around the Chief executive officer, Tim Cook.

There are Various Advantages of this kind of Organizational structure that are as follows:
1. High degree of responsiveness of between various functional head and CEO.
2. Inter department decision making is smooth i.e. the functional heads can make decision based on other functions smoothly.
3. Centralized controlling system.
4. Influence of traditional hierarchy gets reduced.
5. Tim Cook has the ultimate decision making power on all the department functions.

Disadvantages of the current functional organizational structure are as follows:
1. There are 9 functional departments for Tim Cook to handle. Too many to handle

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Americas
2. EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa)
3. Japan
4. Retail
5. APAC (Asia Pacific)
6. Subsidiary FileMaker

Apple Structure – Mechanistic or Organic?

Mechanistic structure is featured by the following things:
1. Stable environment
2. Centralization
3. Low differentiation of tasks
4. Standardization and formalization

While mechanistic structure induce people in predictable, accountable ways with centralize decision-making, organic structure on the other hand encourage people to take initiatives and is found to be very flexible. Apple cannot be clearly defined as purely organic or purely mechanistic.

Apple manufactures its products through Foxconn industries that is located in CHINA. Apple outsource this as they can focus on their core competency. Foxconn is found using performance appraisal and organizational structure in pyramid style bureaucracy. Foxconn even landed up in controversy for threatening employees using performance appraisal. So it can be noticed that whatever functions may require mechanistic structure have been outsourced.

More over, Apple Inc. has applied this structure though:
1. Mass Production
2. Top management’s style of leadership
3. Creating stable and certain