It is a common thing to find an organization continuing with a traditional structure long after its objective, plans and external environment have changed. However, organizational structure must be modified to take people into account and to take full advantage of employee strengths and weaknesses. There could be a danger in that different people would deserve to do the same things resulting in conflict or multiple commands. Also, people have a way of coming and going in an organization through retirement, resignation, promotion or death which might make organizing around them risky and their positions, when vacated, hard to describe accurately and to fill adequately.
This accounts for frictions, politics and inefficiency. Since both the authority and the responsibility for acting are critical, lack of clarity about them is tantamount to lack of knowledge of the parts that members are to play on an organizational team.
The decision – making bottlenecks, excessive referral of small problems to upper echelons, overburdening of top level managers with detail, continual "fire – fighting" and "meeting of crises" and underdevelopment of managers in the lower level of organization give evidence that failing to delegate authority to the proper extent is a mistake which can lead to the followings among others.
Some managers because of their zeal for decentralization may tend to push decision making too far down in the organization and a system of independent organizational satellites may develop when it is not taken to the extreme, excessive delegation may cause organizational failures.
The problems and costs of levels of organization and departmentation could be reduced by opening wide the channels of information. The relevant information should be widely available to people at all levels of the organization. Information gathering should be separated from decision making, since the later requires managerial authority.
A notable cause of mismanagement is assignment of authority without holding a person responsible. Authority delegation is not the same thing with responsibility delegation. Super ordinates remain responsible for the proper exercise of authority by their subordinates.
Sometimes managers hold their subordinate responsible for results they have no power to accomplish. This doesn't happen so frequently where organization lines and duties have been clearly set forth, but where a structure of roles is unclear, confused or it does not exist.
There is the obvious danger when top managers surround themselves with staff specialists and become so preoccupied with the specialists' work they exclude from their schedule the time and attention needed for their line subordinates. The very quality that makes staff specialists valuable (specialized knowledge) also makes them impatient of command. If they were to exercise authority without clear delegation, they would not only undermine the authority of the responsible line official but also break down the unity of command.
Problems may also arise from undefined and unrestricted delegation of functional authority. This is could be as a result of the complexities of a modern enterprise often creating instances where it is desirable to give a predominantly staff or service department functional authority over activities in other parts of the organization. The personnel department for example could hire workers for line departments on the basis of psychological or personality test results without consulting with the managers of the line department.
In any organization the controller via accountant prescribes accounting procedures, the purchasing directors prescribes how and where purchases are made, the personnel manager dictates in line with the union contractor, government regulations, how employees shall be classified for pay purposes, vacation schedule and number of hours to be worked. The traffic manager controls the routine of all freights. The public relation director requires that all public utterances of managers and other employees be cleared or meet a prescribed policy line. With these, operating managers find themselves subject to the direction of a number of people with functional authority in addition to their principal superiors who have the final decision over their pay scales and chances for promotion. It is not surprising that many managers where there are so many functional authorities feel frustrated, especially those at lower levels.
Sometimes people regard a service department as relatively unnecessary and unimportant and therefore something to be ignored when possible. Contrarily also, many service departments mistakenly look upon their functions, as an end unto itself rather than a service to other departments. For example, a statistics department may forget that it exists to finish data desired by others rather than to produce reports of own choosing. This is the same with the personnel department or purchasing department. The greatest misuse of the service department is summoned up in the words "efficient inefficiency" when service departments look more to cost savings than to the efficiency of the entire organization.
Over-organization results from failure to put into practice the idea that the structure of the enterprise is merely a system for making possible the efficient performance of people. Managers tend to complicate the structure by creating many levels and ignore the fact that efficiency is a function of managerial supervision. Managers also over organize by appointing unnecessary line assistants or deputy managers at different levels. Excessive procedures are confused with over-organization. Much of the red tape often blamed on over-organization which really results from poor planning. Too many committees, sapping the time and energies of managers and their staff are often blamed on over-organization rather than on poor organization. Excessive use of committees often results from having authority delegated to too many positions or form vague delegation which actually points to under-organization.