Organization Design: Fashion or Fit

Submitted By: Kriti Singh

22F711

Faulty assumption
The assumption was that all the organisations are alike. Every organisation is unique even when they
belong to the same industry. Another assumption was that organisation design can be changed without
any consequences which is not true. Everything is related in an organisation and nothing can be
changed without effecting the other parts.

The Five Components

 The Top Management: One who takes strategic decisions for the organisation
 Middle Level Management: They are the intermediate level managers
 Technology: Technology used in the operating activities of the organisation
 Operational Level: The basic working level of an organisation
 Support staff: Other services required by an organisation

The Five Configurations

 Simple Structure: In the simplest scenario, coordination is accomplished at the strategic apex
by direct supervision—the CEO issues the directives. A layout with a central line and a
minimal staff is known as a simple structure.
 Machine Bureaucracy: An organization's complete administrative structure, notably its
technostructure, which creates the standards, needs to be elaborated when coordination
depends on the standardisation of work. Machine bureaucracy, a configuration, results from
this.
 Professional Bureaucracy: In contrast, when coordination is achieved by the standardisation
of employee abilities, the company requires a core of highly skilled specialists and a sizable
support group to back them up. Its technostructure and middle line are both rather simple.
Professional bureaucracy is the ensuing arrangement.
 Divisionalized form: The middle-line managers of different organisations may be given
autonomy when organisations are separated into parallel operational units. Coordination is
achieved by standardising the outputs (including performance) of these units. The
divisionalized form, a configuration, appears.
 Adhocracy: Finally, the most complicated firms employ highly skilled specialists, particularly
in their support staffs, and demand that they pool their efforts in project teams managed
 through mutual adjustment. This leads to the adhocracy arrangement, in which line and staff
divisions tend to dissolve along with several other distinctions.

The Five Types of Decentralisations

 Horizontal Decentralisation: Power is delegated outside of the chain of command to non-

managers
 Vertical Decentralisation: Power is delegated down the chain of command
 Centralisation: Power is concentrated to a particular person
 Limited Horizontal Decentralisation
 Limited Vertical Decentralisation

The Dimensions of Five Configurations

 Simple Structure: What is absent from this arrangement is what distinguishes it most. Only a
small portion of its behaviour is standardised or codified, and planning, training, and liaison
devices are used infrequently. The organisation has minimal need for staff analysts because
there is no standardisation. Because so much coordination is accomplished at the strategic
apex by direct supervision, middle-line managers are rarely hired. The main strength of this
design is in that area. Simple structures would rather buy than manufacture, therefore even the
support staff is kept to a minimum to keep the structure lean and adaptable.
 Machine Bureaucracy: To oversee the specialised work of the operating core and to control
disputes that ineluctably arise from the rigorous departmentalization as well as from the
alienation that frequently comes with repetitive, constrained occupations, a vast hierarchy
forms in the middle line. When it comes to the middle-line hierarchy, which is where the true
power of coordination rests, it is typically organised on a functional basis all the way to the
top. In other words, formal power tends to be concentrated at the top in machine bureaucracy,
which is typically vertically centralised.
 Professional Bureaucracy: This bureaucratic design stands out as being significantly different
from the machine bureaucracy because it depends on the standardisation of abilities rather
than work processes or outputs for coordination. It is the design that accounting businesses,
hospitals, and institutions most frequently choose. The organisation cedes a significant
amount of power not only to the professionals themselves but also to the associations and
institutions that initially selected and trained them because it depends on trained professionals
for its operational tasks—skilled people who must be given considerable control over their
own work. Due to this, the organisation appears to be very decentralised; authority over many
choices, both operational and strategic, is transferred all the way down the hierarchy to the
operating team's professionals.
 Divisionalized Form: Like the professional bureaucracy, the divisionalized form is more of a
collection of relatively independent enterprises bound together by a loose administrative
overlay than it is an integrated organisation. However, in the divisionalized version, these
bureaucratic entities are divisions in the middle line rather than individuals, as they are in the
professional bureaucracy's functioning core. The divisionalized form differs from the other
four configurations in one crucial way: it is a partial structure that is overlaid on others rather
than a whole structure. These additional people work in the divisions, all of which are
motivated by machine bureaucracy.
 Adhocracy: Of the five configurations, adhocracy is the most challenging to define because it
is both complex and non-standardized. In fact, adhocracy runs against to much of what we
take for granted about organisations, including consistency in output, administrative control,
command unity, and top-down strategy. Power is continually shifting in this incredibly fluid
 system, and coordination and control are achieved through mutual adjustment through the
informal contact and communication of skilled experts. Adhocracy is also the newest of the
five arrangements and the one that has received the least amount of academic attention.
However, it is starting to emerge as a crucial structural arrangement, deserving of careful
thought.

Configurations as a Diagnostic Tool

Every organisation is subject to the five forces that underlie these configurations: the pull of top
management to centralise, the pull of technostructure to formalise, the pull of operators to
professionalise, the pull of managers of the middle line to balkanize, and the pull of support staff to
collaborate.
The organisation will tend to form close to one of the configurations where one pull predominates—
where the circumstances favour it above all.