How does organizational structure affect companies? Issues that Hewlett Packard have can be a good example to this problem.
As the world’s largest PC manufacturer, Hewlett Packard has always been one of the most popular brands amongst laptop consumers. Since 2008 however, many customers have faced a series of issues with their HP laptops due to problems associated with faulty Nvidia graphic chips built into the computers. Many customers experienced glitches such as display flickering,system lock ups, crashes and failed reboots.
Many consumers believe they have been treated unfairly because their laptops have not been added to a list of affected machines issued by HP. This renders them ineligible for free repairs or extended warranties further exacerbating the lack of distributive and procedural justice.
HP’s organizational structure is strong in bureaucracy and it ensures that they are able to perform in a highly efficient manner. However, it creates subunit conflicts and reduces cohesiveness since each department is highly independent. The marketing department views selling the product as the most important task while the research and development department may believe that design and innovation provides more added value to a product, rather than the quality of it. This results in severe miscommunication as the feedback loop fails to function adequately leading to consumer technical and customer service support issues.
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