Study On Structure Evolution Among Departments: A Perspective Of Power In Organizational Network

With the continuous change of external environment, enterprise’s strategy and organizational structure are changing. If the organizational structure can’t keep pace with the external environmental, the organization is difficult to adapt to the outside environment, so that conflict will emerge and strategic goals of the organization will be difficult to realize. Therefore, organizations need to constantly change to make the currently organizational structure match the external environment. Due to the presence of these realistic problems, a lot of scholars studied the organizational change, evolution and structure design. For example, some scholars studied the influence factors and characteristics in the design and evolution of the organizational structure in different development stages. But few scholars studied evolution process and discipline of power of the department in the process of the evolution of the organizational structure. On this basis, this paper studied how the organizational department power changed, and how the evolution of department structure influenced the change of department power in the process of the organizational development. At the same time, this paper studied the relationship between the strategic themes of the organizations and organizational structure changes.Firstly, this paper arranged some related concepts and theories on organizational evolution and the power in organizational network, and put forward the hypothesis of this paper on the basis of the existing theories. Then this paper studied the change of department power in the process of organizational evolution by analyzing the change of the core and surrounding departments in the development process of the case enterprise by the method of the process study. The result showed most organization’s core departments maintained a stable state in the organizational development. The organization more tended to adjust the surrounding department to respond to the change of organizational strategy. Namely, departments having high power maintained a stable state in the organizational development, departments having low power would be more likely to be adjusted to adapt to organizational strategy. Then we examined the influence of the evolution between departments on the time of departments maintaining the core and surrounding status through the analysis of the existed data. The result showed that when a core department evolved more core departments, its core position will maintain longer. When a surrounding department evolved more surrounding departments, its surrounding position will maintain longer, and its status is difficult to turn around the core position. Meanwhile, it also showed that the department once obtained the core power in the organization structure; its core power was difficult to be shaken. The interaction between the powers can only strengthen the power, the interaction between weak powers only makes its own weak power last much longer.In this paper, we analyzed the evolution process of the department structure and the influence of the evolution between departments on department power from a perspective of the power of organizational network, which opened a new perspective of the evolution research of the department structure. It has certain theoretical value on the study of organizational structure evolution and department power. At the same time, this study embedded empirical research into the process study of case analysis, and put the exploratory research and quantitative research together. This makes the research more scientific. This study selected a typical state-owned enterprise as the study case. The results of the study have certain reference value in understanding the evolution of China’s state-owned enterprises.