Q.A newly formed company has hired 40 employees for its first year of operations, but has not created any departments, job titles, or reporting structure. Every employee reports directly to the owner, and employees are often confused about whose instructions to follow when two employees are assigned overlapping tasks. Based on this situation, answer:

The lack of departments, defined job titles and a clear reporting structure, combined with everyone reporting to one person and overlapping task confusion, is a textbook symptom of missing organizing, not staffing (which the company has already done by hiring people).

Having hired people is a staffing success — the failure is that no structure exists around them.

1. Identifying the function: The company has already completed staffing — it has successfully hired 40 employees. The problem described is entirely structural: no departments, no job titles, no defined reporting lines, and everyone reporting to a single owner regardless of role, leading to overlapping tasks and confusion about whose instructions to follow. This is a clear failure of the organizing function, which is specifically responsible for dividing work, grouping it into departments, assigning duties, and establishing reporting relationships.
2. Recommended corrective steps, following the standard organizing process:

• Identification and division of work — the company should first list out all the activities its 40 employees are actually performing (e.g., production, sales, accounts, customer support) and divide this total workload into distinct, non-overlapping jobs, so two employees are never assigned the same task without a clear distinction of responsibility.
• Departmentalisation — related activities should then be grouped into departments (for example, a Production department, a Sales/Marketing department, and a Finance/Accounts department), so that work within each group can be coordinated by one departmental head instead of by the owner directly.
• Assignment of duties — specific employees should be assigned specific job titles and duties matching their skills, removing the current ambiguity about who is responsible for what.
• Establishing reporting relationships — a clear chain of command should be created, for instance a departmental head for each area reporting to the owner, and the 40 employees reporting to their respective departmental heads rather than all 40 reporting directly to one person. This directly resolves the "whose instructions to follow" confusion, since each employee would then have one identifiable immediate superior.

These changes would not require hiring anyone new — they address a purely structural gap in an already-staffed company.

Students sometimes suggest 'hire a manager' as the fix, treating this purely as a staffing problem. While a departmental head may need to be appointed, the core fix is structural (creating departments and reporting lines) — organizing — not simply adding more people.