Two years ago, you created GoForLess, a new app that shows people the cheapest way to travel by bus, train, or air between two cities. Turns out that your app was a big success, and now you’ve made enough money to hire some additional employees. You’re trying to figure out what your new employees should do. What kinds of jobs should they have? How should they work together? How should they work with you? How can you give your employees enough freedom to be innovative, while maintaining enough control over their work to be sure that GoForLess will stay true to its overall goals?

You start by thinking about specialization. To what extent do your new employees need to have broad job responsibilities versus narrow job responsibilities? You know that to build a good app, you need to have people who have infrastructure automation, community building, programming, copywriting, data visualization, user experience, business, innovation, analysis, design, testing, and domain knowledge skills.

Look at the following two organizational designs and indicate which one you would choose.

A. I want my employees to have broad job responsibilities. I’ll hire a small group of employees next year that have multiple skills, and ask them to work on anything that will help the company meet its goals.

B. I want my employees to have very narrow job responsibilities. I’ll hire more people with specific experience next year, and each person will form the basis for future departments in my company.

Five years go by, and now you’ve hired 30 additional employees. Recently, you’ve noticed that some of your employees seem less happy than they were earlier. You hear complaints that people are bored and tired of doing the same thing all the time.

Which approach would you choose to solve problems most commonly associated with highly specialized work?

A. I would centralize my company.

B. I would decentralize my company.