Virtual organizations: structure, management, and operations

Virtual Organizations

Presently, the organizations have changed to make jobs as well as, employees to become efficient and more effective. Among the changes that have been noticed is that many organizations have managed to restructure their organization's structure to become virtual. Virtual organizations are groups of organizationally distributed participants who team up towards a shared goal using information and communication technologies to accomplish a task. It describe a network of independent firms, which joins together to produce a service or product (Baack, 2012). Today, many companies are looking to creating virtual organizations for their businesses because of the organizational improvement and innovations it can provide. Most managers are creating an intranet in a virtual organization to hold shareable company data since it is renowned to be the best form of communication between employees. The goal of virtual organization is to provide innovative and high quality services in response to customer demands (Certo C. & Certo, 2012).

One of the pros associated with this design is that, the organization can reduce the operating expenses by introducing a virtual organization. These operating expenses include; utility expenses such as insurances, electricity water, rent and many others. As a result, the company is also capable of outsourcing much work to freelancers to their companies especially those who are connected electronically. For that reason, they need not to accommodate these employees/workers by having office space to pay rent.

Secondly, most employees prefer working at home rather in the company's office. This is because they seem to be working faster at homes as opposed to very distributed areas. Therefore, virtual organization can increase the output or productivity for people who like working at home.

Thirdly, virtual organization is also significant because it allows firms to create jobs making workers more efficient and effective. For instance, today, many jobs do not need employees to go to their places of work daily since it requires working with the employees directly. As a consequence, the employees can contact their customers more quickly and save time.

One disadvantage associate with this design is that, building desired corporate culture in virtual organization may be difficult. In this case, employers and employees may not be able to understand about each other because of different cultures and geographies and this can create a complex culture at the workplace.

Secondly, there are difficulties in controlling workers. Managers may find it hard to measure the commitment as well as, the performance of workers especially when they work at their homes compared to working in the company's offices where managers are able to see their employees every day.

Lastly, communication within the organization may become difficult particularly for the virtual offices because of less physical interactions. For example, when meetings are scheduled, the managers are forced to arrange for the actual time and exact date for meetings held online. Conversely, workers who work in different time zones can as well find it more difficult to communicate with their employers.