Many organizations, particularly large, complex ones, use several types of departmentalization to create a hybrid structure. Any mixture of types can be used. For example, some organizations have functional departments within a manufacturing facility, but sales are departmentalized by territory, with separate sales managers and salespeople in different areas. Matrix departmentalization combines functional and product departmentalization. With matrix departmentalization, an employee works for a functional department and is also assigned to one or more products or projects.

A divisional structure is based on semiautonomous strategic business units. It is sometimes called multidivisional or M-form. Staying innovative over time is challenging, as organizations need to continually redesign their structures to align with environmental changes. Reengineering is the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical contemporary measures of performance, such as cost, quality, service, and speed.

A virtual organization is a continually evolving network of contingent workers and companies that unite temporarily to exploit specific project opportunities or to attain strategic advantages. Work is becoming more based on knowledge. In a learning organization, everyone in the firm is engaged in identifying and solving problems to continuously improve and achieve the firm’s objectives through knowledge sharing. One of the newest structures is platforms that are used to connect buyers and sellers. Platforms utilize the shared economy. Firms are changing the way they organize.