Uber Organizational Structure
Uber organizational structure has been traditionally highly hierarchical with co-founder and former CEO Travis Kalanick yielding tremendous power and micromanaging the ride-hailing giant. Lack of Kalanick’s leadership skills resulted in a series of scandals involving bullying, discrimination at workplace, sexual harassment etc. Kalanick had to resign as a result of these scandals. After Dara Khosrowshahi became new CEO in 2017, Uber organizational structure has been subjected to certain changes.[1]
Figure below illustrates Uber organizational structure:
Uber Organizational Structure
It can be argued that the current pattern of Uber’s organizational structure illustrated in Figure 1 above can be subjected to more changes by new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi in the medium-term perspective. Demoralized workforce and poor organizational culture belong to the list of major issues for the global transportation technology company. Dara Khosrowshahi is credited for creating collaborative work culture at Expedia where employees are encouraged to propose their ideas to management.
Mr. Khosrowshahi is attempting to fix Uber organizational culture as part of his grand plans to turnaround the business. Accordingly, improvement in organizational culture may necessitate changes in organizational structure. Specifically, de-layering of organizational structure may be introduced, removing certain levels of management in order to make the business more flexible to respond to the changes in external marketplace. Moreover, advantages of flat organizational structure include faster speed of communication between the top management and floor-level employees.
Senior leadership reorganization initiated by CEO Dara Khosrowshahi due to failed IPO in 2019 the roles of chief operating officer (COO) and chief marketing officer (CMO) were eliminated. Specifically, COO role was replaced by two executives who manage biggest businesses – ride-haling and food delivery. These two executives directly report to Khosrowshahi. Uber marketing operations, on the other hand, were combined with communications and policy departments. The rationale behind this specific change was to ensure the consistency of marketing message communicated to organizational stakeholders.
Uber Technologies Inc. Report contains the above analysis of Uber organizational structure. The report illustrates the application of the major analytical strategic frameworks in business studies such as SWOT, PESTEL, Porter’s Five Forces, Value Chain analysis, Ansoff Matrix and McKinsey 7S Model on Uber. Moreover, the report contains analyses of Uber leadership, business strategy and organizational culture. The report also comprises discussions of Uber marketing strategy, ecosystem and addresses issues of corporate social responsibility.
