Matrix Organization Concept

Having worked in the military (8 years) and the aerospace/defense industries (25 years) for a total of 33 years, I have experienced working in matrix organizations for more time than I would have desired.  The matrix organization concept has its advantages and disadvantages.  From my experience, I cannot say that the matrix organization has ever worked well.  Personally, I dislike it a lot.  More accurately, I hate it.

The matrix organization works somewhat well for very large programs and companies.  The real advantage comes in when there are lots of workload peaks and valleys in the various organizations, projects, and tasks.  Organizations, projects, and tasks that are experiencing workload valleys transfer employees to those organizations, projects, and tasks that are experiencing workload peaks.  Hence, these transfers eliminate wasted downtime by those employees working in workload valleys and without any meaningful work to do.

The matrix organization concept works pretty well for those who transfer full time to another organization/project/task.  However, the problem comes in when they assign employees to two or more organizations, projects, and/or tasks.  Multiple bosses expect you to be dedicated full time to their organization/project/task.  That is where the problem comes in.  You are in the middle, and more than one boss tugs on you to get their work done.  In the meantime, you run helter-skelter trying to satisfy multiple bosses simultaneously.  Very seldom do you keep all bosses happy.  At best, you will keep one boss happy, and the other boss is very unhappy with you.

The multiple boss assignments come into play for those who have esoteric talents, capabilities, and qualifications.  These people include those with unique skills such as risk management, system safety engineering, system security engineering, or reliability engineering.  When the company has only one person in the entire company with such a skill, then, in most cases, they assign that person to multiple projects or tasks.  Hence, smaller companies with matrix management structures experience more of these multiple-assignment problems.

For areas like systems engineering, manufacturing engineering, and accounting/finance, where several people are assigned to do that kind of work, employees can be assigned to full-time work in an organization, project, and/or task.  Hence, for those people, they do not experience the problem of needing to satisfy multiple bosses simultaneously.

As a manager, I prefer employees being assigned to me full time.  Then, I do not need to deal with the multiple-assignment problem.  As can be seen, it is a problem for both multiple-assigned employees as well as for managers assigned these people.  Conscientious employees assigned to you tend to minimize the problem.  However, an employee who “games” the system presents you (the manager) with additional problems.

You will always have the problem of multiple managers competing for the same human resource.  However, sometimes, an employee tells you that he/she is working on a task for the other manager.  Then, that same employee tells the other manager that he/she is working on a task for you.  In the meantime, he/she is floating between your two jobs chatting with friends and not getting any work done for both managers.  Those kinds of employees do not really care about satisfying either boss and, thus, take advantage of the situation.  In other words, he/she “games” the system to keep from doing any work whatsoever.  However, fortunately, these kinds of employees are few-and-far-between.

In summary, I prefer not operating in a matrix management system.  As a program manager, I prefer to have all employees directly assigned to my program.  That way, I have full control over my employees.  The major problem program managers must deal with in a matrix management organization is this: Employees directly assigned to functional managers are on loan to program managers.  Hence, program managers must use polished management and diplomatic skills to coax workers to spend more time on their projects/tasks instead of other program managers’ projects/tasks.  It becomes a big game of diplomacy, human relations, interpersonal relationships, and getting workers to like you so that they prefer to do work for you before doing work for other program managers.

As mentioned before, these employees are direct reports to their respective functional organizational managers.  Hence, to whom do you think they give their total allegiance?  They give their allegiance to the functional organizational manager…of course!  The functional manager is the one who writes the assigned employees’ performance appraisals.  So, whom do you think the employees will try to satisfy first before satisfying any of the program managers to which they are on loan?  Remember the Golden Rule: He/she who passes out the gold…rules!  The functional manager owns the gold and passes out the assignments, promotions, raises, awards, and perquisites; hence, guess who rules the workers?  Therefore, can you see the problem that program managers must live with working in a matrix organization?  That is why I dislike matrix organizations a lot—hate it!

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