Advantages and disadvantages of Coordination in Management

We call Coordination that flows laterally within an organization, involving people who are at the same level. Coordination usually involves communicating information and allowing people with the same or similar rank in an organization to cooperate or collaborate.

Both have advantages and disadvantages.

Advantages of Coordination in Management

• Informal and good relations: Being a communication system at the same level, it facilitates the exchange of ideas, knowledge and thoughts between the different departments. Being colleagues with the same level of hierarchy within the organization, the relationship that is maintained during communication is informal and almost always cordial.
• Coordination of activities: To achieve the best results in an organization, inter-departmental communication systems must be developed to coordinate activities, and the best type of communication to facilitate this communication is communication.
• Departmental communication: Derived from the previous one, communication is also the main type of communication to achieve good communication within a department.
• End of misunderstandings: There is less chance of misunderstandings in communication between employees. Therefore it is useful to manage the improvement of mutual understanding and good decision making.
• Mitigate the bureaucracy: Communication prevents the bureaucracy from increasing what helps to create good relationships.
• Dynamizes work: If communication is established in an organization, the dynamism among the workers will increase.
• Group activities: With this communication system the departments know each other well and can exchange ideas and create working groups and management that improve productivity.
• Rapid communication and problem-solving : Communication allows the rapid transmission of messages and the resolution of complex problems within an organization.
• Linkage with different areas of knowledge: The exchange of information between employees of the same level allows to easily discover different areas of knowledge.
• The distortion of messages is avoided : The communication carried out between employees of the same level gets that the information arrives directly from one employee or a manager to another, which acts as a protector of the deformation of the messages.

Disadvantages or limitations of Coordination

In addition to the above advantages, Coordination also has some disadvantages:

• Information overload: Given that in communication the information is filtered less, many times there is a large amount of data that must be ordered and this can lead to an overload.
• Loss of time: As a result of the previous disadvantage, the need for excessive data classification can cause too much useful and valuable time to be consumed.
• Positional problem: If we have a positional problem in one of the departments, because we have personnel that should not be there, communication could cause a failure that can lead to an objective of the organization cannot be met.
• Lack of understanding: If there is a lack of understanding among employees, this communication may not be successful.
• Procedure problem: Sometimes communication is interrupted by a procedural problem.
• Over-specialization: There may be a problem of specialization when organizations do not have uniformity within departments, causing communication difficulties. For example with the procedures or the vocabulary used by the different departments. When this happens, organizations have difficulties to function correctly without problems.
• Lack of motivation: Communication often fails simply because the members of the organization are not willing to make the extra effort that is required. It may require contacting people in other units of the company and the channels and rules of interaction may not be entirely clear. Sometimes we do not know these people and the obligation to communicate with them can make us feel uncomfortable or take too long.
• Rivalry: Rivalry within organizations with communication occurs, for example, when different levels of an organization do not cooperate with each other.
• Ignore vertical communication: In communication, employees of the same level contact or exchange information with each other. But in most cases they do not inform their superiors in hierarchy, breaking or ignoring vertical communication, which is also necessary.
• Low productivity: Communication often fails simply because the members of the organization are not willing to make the extra effort required and waste useful and valuable time from their superiors, which leads to low productivity.