Authority Case

Authority means gives one person the power to hold other people accountable for their actions and the right to make decisions about the use of organizational resources. Therefore, establishing a hierarchy of authority is supposed to improve the way an organization functions because people can be held accountable for their actions. However, many company complain that when a hierarchy exists, employees are constantly looking to their superiors for direction. When there are some new or unusual issue arises, they prefer not to deal with it, they will pass it to their superior and avoiding to take the responsibility and risk. When there are no member is willing to take responsibility, decision making becomes slow and the organization becomes inflexible, which is unable to change and adapt to new developments. This is showed that when Sony's engineers were empowered to pursue their own ideas, and the leaders of its different divisions, and hundreds of products were allowed to pursue their own innovations.

Centralized is organizational setup in which the authority to make important decisions is retained by managers at the top of the hierarchy. Decentralized is an organizational setup in which the authority to make important decision about organizational resources and to initiate new projects is delegated to managers at all levels in the hierarchy. As a result, Stringer decide to balance between centralizing and decentralizing authority at Sony because he found that Sony's leader were slow to recognize the speed at which technology was changing and the slower decision making bring the increased of operating costs. For examples, products such as Apple's iPod and iPhone and Nintendo's Wii game console better met customer needs than Sony's out-of-date and expensive products. In addition, Sony's organizing approach no longer worked in its favor because the leaders of its different product divisions worked to protect their own personal empires and division's goals and not those of the whole company. Besides that, companies such as LG, Samsung, and Apple innovated new technologies such as advanced LCD flat-screens, flash memory, touch-screen commands, mobile digital music, video and GPS positioning devices, and 3D displays that made many of Sony's technologies, such as its Trinitron TVs and Walkmans obsolete. This make Sony feel that competitors are work and launch better than it.

As a result, at