Organizations and the location of the decision making authority

Abstract: This dissertation was aimed to research how well the existing theories in decision making and organizational structure agree with the modern organizations of today. The nature of our research made it necessary for us to use both the deductive and the inductive approach. The deductive mainly because we started our research by exploring already existing data and the inductive approach because we created our own data though the multiple case studies, in form of semi-structured interviews, of three Swedish organizations. This was done in order to make it possible for us to get a deeper understanding of the chosen subject, and we kept an open mind for the results. We also researched where in the organizations the authority of decision making is located, in order to see to what extend these organizations are centralized/decentralized and how much authority the local managers have in their own hands. The results we got in our research to both the first research question, which was where in the organizations the authority of decision making is located, and to the second research question, which was how much authority the interviewed local managers had, were similar. The results showed that the researched organizations were both centralized and decentralized at the same time. Yet, the level of centralization and decentralization and the authority held by the interviewed local managers depends on the structure of the organization and on the environment that the organizations operate in.