More About Functional Departments

The advantages of functional departments are:
· Resources are better used
- all the filing will take place in one area
- there are less chance of files going missing
- filing cabinets and storage will not have to be kept all over the building.

· There are greater skills and expertise
- For example, staff working in Administration will become expert in maintaining filing systems.

· Career paths are created
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For example, once you have developed expertise in one of the departments it is easier to obtain promotion in that area.

· Communication and cooperation within the department are excellent
- all the people within the department work together and know each other well

· Team work improves
- Working together means that staff have a feeling of all being in it together” and they are motivated to work harder for each other for the department. This improves their abilities to solve problems.

The disadvantages of functional departments are:
· Rivalry between departments
- This can lead to staff seeing other departments as rivals and competitors rather than fellow workers. This can lead to in-fighting which causes time wasting and inefficency.

· Barriers to communication between departments
- Although there may be excellent communication between the departments within departments, it is often only the managers of different departments who have formal contact with each other.
This means that communication between departments can be slow, which means decision making for the whole organisation is less effective and more time-consuming than it should be.

· Departments still have to work together- Many day-to-day problems will need the attention of more than one department. It may be difficult to identify who has overall responsibility.