Presented as a report by J. B. Nangpuhan II (MPA student) for the class (Organizational Design) of Dr. S. K. Kim at CNU, Korea in 2010 (Fall semester).
SUMMARY
Key terms:
(division of labor, coordination, configurations, standardization, operators, managers, analysts, staff)
The structure of an organization can be defined simply as the sum total of the ways in which its labor is divided into distinct tasks and then its coordination is achieved among its tasks. Every human activity – from the making of pots to the placing of a man on the moon – gives two fundamental opposing requirements. First is the division of labor into various tasks to be performed and second is the coordination of these tasks to accomplish the activity. The elements of structure should be selected to achieve an internal consistency or harmony, as well as basic consistency with the organization’s situation – its size, its age, the kind of environment in which it functions, the technical system it uses, and so on. Indeed, these situational factors are often “chosen” no less than are the elements of structure themselves. The organization’s niche in its environment, how large it grows, the methods it uses to produce its products or services – all these are selected too. This leads us to the conclusion that both the design parameters and the situational factors should be clustered to create what we call configurations. In principle, there are a great number of configurations but in practice only few are effective for most organizations. The central theme of our book is that a limited number of these configurations explain most of the tendencies that drive effective organizations to structure themselves as they do. In other words, the design of an effective organizational structure – in fact, even the diagnosis of problems in many ineffective ones – seems to involve the consideration of only a few basic configurations. In this chapter, it introduces two concepts: description of basic mechanisms by which organizations achieve coordination, and description of organization itself, in terms of a set of interrelated parts.