Abstract

The wave of change for organizations in digital era is becoming a more than common experience. It is embedded in many different components of the organizations, mainly digitally. This transformation is building the digital future of the organizations. It influences organizations in many ways including changes in their culture, their thinking style, their business models, their daily organizational behaviors, their systems and processes, their structure (both formal and informal) and finally their impact on people and society. On this chapter, some of the most important trends which are influencing the organizational structure of organizations are discussed. Having awareness about these changes and being ready for them, helps many organizations to increase their chance of survival in our today’s VUCA world while considering the potential of digital technologies and platforms, and by gaining knowledge on the fault lines they may face in this transformation process.
All organizations need to have some strategies and plans to manage this pace of change which some opinions have described it as a digital Darwinism in which society and technology are experiencing a faster change compared to organization (Mirkovic et al., 2019).
The digital era which is characterized by use of technologic tools, deeper organizational interactions, greater collaborations, faster knowledge sharing, knowledge networking, agility, using smart teams (with both human and non-human members), flexibility, open innovation and talent flow; has a critical impact on organizational structures.
On coming sections some of the transformation trends and ideas are shared. This chapter tries to give the readers a better holistic view about them and show some of the most important emerging trends as well. We need to emphasize that some of the items shared in this chapter are dependent on contextual factors as well and the level of the readiness and maturity of organizations can impact the performance of the organizations about them.