Organization Design and HR

From the capability inventory to an organization chart

Take out your Week 7 capability inventory. Its main verdict was that, for the 12-week test of Option A · Expansion (expand cheerleading and sports-entertainment talent management), cross-border coordination is still Mina's skill, not yet a capability of Judy's company. In the failure test, Judy's staff imagined Mina sick on game day. They found that nobody else held the home-team contacts, the record of photo approvals or the authority to decide. The "next step" column asked for a game-day sheet, a trained backup, a shared record that more than one person can see, and a one-page offer so the terms do not depend on who presents them. The offer is taken up in Week 12; until then, the chart below still has no backup for agreements.

Each of those next steps is a question about organization. Who does which work? Who may decide what, and within which limits? Who steps in when the usual person is away?

A small, founder-led company can run a surprising amount of work through memory, direct messages and quick decisions. This feels efficient. It can also hide who carries the work, and who does not feel able to say that something is wrong.

This chapter continues the practice scenario from earlier weeks, which is invented for learning. This week's question is: which roles, decision limits and people practices let the Option A test run reliably, and protect the people doing the work, when no single person can hold everything?

Where this week fits

Week 7 found which abilities depend on one person. This week designs an organization chart for the Option A test: the roles, who decides what, who can say no and how an exception moves through the company. In Week 9, you will audit the staffing assumptions in that chart. In Week 10, you will use its lines to design how messages travel.

Organization design: who knows, and who decides?

Organization design is the arrangement of work, information and authority, so that the right person can act at the right time. An organization chart is a picture of that arrangement. Its boxes and lines are useful only if they show how work and information actually move.

Charts are often described by their shape. A flat organization chart has few levels between the person at the top and the people doing the work. A flat chart can still send every decision to the founder. So the shape of a chart does not tell you who really decides.

Researchers sometimes say that structure is a way of processing information. Every decision needs information, and that information sits with particular people. The structure decides whether the information reaches the person with authority, and whether it arrives in time. Joseph and Gaba (2020) reviewed decades of research that links organization structure to how organizations gather information and make decisions.

Mina learns on Thursday that the performer's flight lands late on Friday night. Judy has the authority to change the agreement with the home team. If nothing moves Mina's information to Judy quickly, the decision is made either without the information or too late. So the useful design question is: where is the information for a decision, how fast must it be used, and which role should have the authority to act?

Delegation with information and limits

Week 2 introduced decision rights and delegation. This week adds one design point: delegation works when the person receives the information and a clear limit, and when someone reviews the result. Coats and Rankin (2016) found in a laboratory experiment that people delegated less than economic models predicted, so the knowledge of those closest to the work was used less.

In the practice scenario, Mina is closest to the schedule. The Week 5 goal tree already lets her change rehearsal times within the agreed dates. She may not change the agreement itself or make a promise that affects the performer's rest or image. That boundary is not a sign of distrust. It tells Mina where she can act quickly on her own, and when she must pass a question up to Judy.

Write the work before naming the title

Role clarity means that people understand their tasks, what they may decide and whom they depend on. A job title alone does not give this. "Talent manager" could include recruiting, planning rehearsals and looking after a performer's well-being. These tasks need different skills and different safeguards. So write the work first, and then decide which tasks one role can safely combine.

Founder-led work is especially open to role confusion. Judy may be the public face, the employer and a friend to the performer, all at once. Each role carries a different obligation. When they conflict, informal words such as "we are like family" do not settle the question of who decides.

The same thinking explains a role that did not exist before this week: the performer liaison. The coordinator is judged on delivering the games on time. The liaison's job is the performer's side of the work: her rest, her consent and her concerns. Keeping these jobs apart means that the performer's concerns do not depend on the person who is under pressure to keep the schedule.

Worked example: an organization chart for the Option A test

This chart designs the organization for the 12-week test. In a small company, one person often holds several roles. Here each role has a different holder, so that the backups are real.

Two rules from the performer's agreement shape the chart. First, no photo is published without her written approval (the Week 5 red line). Second, she has at least 12 hours of rest between the end of one working session and the start of the next, and travel counts as a working session. The chart must also respect one limit on Mina's side: she cannot work after 6 p.m. Coordination hours follow the Week 6 partner arrangement, in which the home team's event staff handle game-day logistics.

The reporting lines are simple. Judy has three direct reports: Mina, the liaison and the bookkeeper. The translator is a freelancer who takes day-to-day instructions from Mina, and the performer works under her agreement. One line is deliberate: the liaison reports to Judy, not to Mina. The person who hears the performer's concerns should not report to the person who is judged on keeping the schedule.

Every schedule message to the performer passes through two people. The translator checks the Korean wording, and the liaison sends it and hears the answer. Compare this with the Week 7 failure test. The game-day contacts now live in a sheet that the translator can use, and the translator has a written limit for acting as backup. Photo approvals sit in a shared record, and the liaison may pause work if a rule is broken.

Tracing one exception through the chart

A design shows its value when the normal routine stops working. An exception is a situation the routine does not cover, which someone must handle by deciding something new. Here is one exception, traced through the chart.

It is Thursday of test week 4, two days before game 1 on Saturday. The performer's flight lands at 22:30 on Friday, and she reaches her hotel at about 23:30. Under the 12-hour rest rule, her earliest start on Saturday is 11:30. At 16:00 on Thursday, the home team's event staff send Mina a message: the court is needed in the afternoon, so Saturday's rehearsal moves from 13:00 to 09:00. The translator is at another job until 20:00, so no Korean message can be checked before then.

The trace shows what the chart adds. Mina acted fast where she had authority, stopped where she did not, and passed the question up before her working day ended. The performer's "no" arrived early, through a person whose job was to hear it. Judy spent about an hour on the exception, because the information reached her already checked.

The trace also separates authority from blame. If something had still gone wrong, the record would show whether the cause was an unclear role, missing information or a promise the company should stop making.

Psychological safety: can people speak up?

The exception worked partly because people spoke up early. Psychological safety is a shared belief in a team that it is safe to take interpersonal risks, such as asking a question, admitting a mistake or challenging a plan, without being humiliated or punished. Edmondson (1999) found that in work teams, psychological safety was linked to more learning behavior, such as discussing errors, and learning behavior to better performance.

Psychological safety works alongside high standards. People can disagree sharply and still feel safe to speak. A common misunderstanding is that it means a pleasant atmosphere where every idea is accepted. A team can be friendly and still unsafe, if concerns quietly disappear. It can be demanding and still safe, if people can question a decision and receive a reasoned answer.

Safety also needs a response. A voice system states who receives a concern, how quickly they answer and what the person can do if the first answer fails. In the scenario, the translator might notice that the Korean schedule and the home team's version differ by one hour. She will speak up quickly only if she expects thanks, not blame for the delay.

Power sets a limit on safety. In many workplaces, the person who invites opinions also controls the next opportunity, the pay or even, for example, a work permit that depends on the employer. People then weigh the cost of disagreeing, however friendly the invitation. Design can reduce this pressure in three ways:

• Separate who hears a concern from who made the decision. This is why the liaison reports to Judy and not to Mina.
• Record changes instead of agreeing in a private chat. A record lets a person show later what was asked of them.
• Tell people what will be shared, and with whom. A concern is easier to raise when the person knows who will see it.

Personal trust still matters. The aim is that basic protection does not depend on being close to the founder.

Four kinds of fairness

Organizational justice is how fairly people believe they are treated at work. Research separates four kinds of fairness. The table gives one example of each from the test.

A grievance route is the formal path for raising a complaint when fairness breaks down. It names who receives the complaint and how fast they respond. It also protects the person from punishment for complaining and gives a way to appeal. It must work in a language the person can use. In the chart, the performer can go to the liaison or directly to Judy.

People practices work as a system

Hiring, training and pay should send the same message about the work. Huselid (1995) studied nearly a thousand companies and found that those using more high-performance work practices tended to have lower staff turnover and better productivity and financial results. For a small company, the useful idea is that practices support or undermine each other. Here are two examples of conflicting signals.

• Hiring for initiative, then requiring approval for everything. The company may conclude that its people lack initiative, when in fact the system removed their authority.
• Rewarding speed, then allowing no time for language checks. A translation error then looks like a personal failure, although the incentive made it likely.

In the scenario, the practices around the chart must match it. Training the translator as a backup needs paid hours before game 1. Feedback for Mina should look at accurate records, timely handoffs and passing the right questions up to Judy, not at whether every request from the home team received a "yes".

Language is part of the structure

Week 4 showed that language decides who receives information and who can object. Inside the company, language also shapes who is heard. Luo and Shenkar (2006) described the multinational company as a multilingual community, in which the choice of working language is an organization design decision. Studies of multicultural teams point the same way: differences in fluency shaped how team rules were formed (Vigier & Spencer-Oatey, 2018), and members more fluent in the official language gained more informal influence (Guzman & Reiche, 2024).

In the scenario, suppose the weekly check-in runs in Chinese. The liaison speaks Korean more comfortably, so her concerns about the performer get less time than Mina's schedule updates. A simple change helps: a short written agenda in both languages, with performer items taken first and led by the liaison. The meeting then hears the person with the information, not only the most fluent speaker.

Counting exceptions, not only people

Span of control is the number and range of people and tasks a manager can coordinate well. Counting direct reports is only a rough start. A better measure is exception load: how often a manager must handle a situation the routine does not cover. Judy has three direct reports, which sounds manageable. But exceptions from all three lines of business, including the content and food-service work from Week 6, can land on her desk.

Keep a simple exception log for four weeks. Count how often a schedule changes, a translation needs correcting or a payment needs approval. If the same person handles every exception, that person is a bottleneck even when routine work has been delegated. The response may be a clearer rule, a trained second person or fewer commitments at once.

Standardize the purpose, adapt the method

A growing company must choose what to make the same everywhere and what to leave to local judgment. A useful rule has two parts. Standardize the purpose, the minimum protection and the record. Allow the method to adapt when the local role can explain why and still keeps the protection.

The photo rule is an example of this two-part rule. Its standard is fixed: no photo is published without the performer's written approval, and every approval goes into the shared record. The method can change: the liaison may explain the request in Korean by phone and then ask for a written reply. With a different performer, the explanation might happen in another language. The rule should also say who may change it, so that exceptions do not quietly become new policy.

The organization must be able to say no

Refusal is an easily overlooked people practice. A company that accepts every request looks responsive, but it can make promises that no role can keep fairly. When nobody is allowed to refuse, people fall back on silence, delay or private workarounds, and these hide the real capacity problem.

Build refusal into the design. A role may decline a task when the information is missing, the request goes beyond the agreed scope or the schedule breaks a safety rule. The role then says what happens next: pass it up to Judy, renegotiate or decline. In the exception above, the performer's "no" and Mina's "received, under review" were both forms of well-designed refusal. When the company records why it said no, it learns whether it needs a new capability, a narrower offer or a different price.

AI tools in scheduling and staffing

Week 7 showed that a tool becomes part of a capability only when people review and own its use. The people-management point is that any ranking or schedule a tool produces must be open to challenge by the people it affects. A scheduling tool might have proposed the 09:00 rehearsal because the court was free, without knowing the rest rule. The performer and the liaison must be able to see such a proposal, question it and have a person correct it.

Organization design for the three options

Each option would need a different chart, because each makes different promises. The other two options are Option B · Boutique (a small cross-border talent and advisory service for a few clients) and Option C · Content-centered return (return to content, advertising, food service and personal brand). The table compares the design questions without ranking the options.

Judge a design by whether it makes work, authority and protection visible, not by whether it looks impressive. A five-role chart can be excellent if decisions and safeguards are clear. A large chart can fail if one person holds every approval and nobody can challenge an unsafe plan.

Class practice: an organization chart and one exception

This practice is done without AI tools. Your teacher will tell you which worksheet to use and how to submit it. Bring your Week 7 capability inventory.

1. Name four roles from the work. Start from the activities in your inventory, not from titles. For each role, write one decision it makes alone.
2. Mark who can say no. Name one person who may refuse a request, and to whom that refusal goes.
3. Trace one exception. Use the late rehearsal change from the reading, or one from your own option. Show in three or four steps who acts and what each step protects.
4. Name one people practice the chart needs. For example, backup training, a grievance route or a way to give feedback.

Label every role, hour and rule you invent. Then swap with a classmate, who looks for one decision that has no owner. Keep your chart for Week 9.

Key points and what you bring to Week 9

• Organization design arranges work, information and authority so that the right person can act in time. Write the work before naming the title.
• Delegation works when a role has information, a clear limit and someone who reviews the result.
• An exception trace tests a chart. In the worked example, clear limits let Mina act fast, the liaison heard the performer's "no" early, and Judy decided with checked information.
• Psychological safety lets people speak up without fear of humiliation or punishment. Design protects it when power is uneven, for example by separating who hears a concern from who made the decision.
• Fairness has four kinds: distributive, procedural, interpersonal and informational. An organization must also be able to say no.

For Week 9. Bring your organization chart. In Week 9, the midterm evidence audit, you will check which staffing assumptions in the chart, such as hours, backups and limits, rest on evidence and which were invented. In Week 10, the chart's reporting lines become the starting point for your communication protocol.