More Recent Contributions to Understanding How Organizations Function

Kotter (1995) developed the following overall framework for examining organizations:


● key organizational processes – the major information gathering, communication, decision-making, matter/energy transporting and matter/energy converting actions of the organization’s employees and machines;


● external environment – an organization’s ‘task’ environment includes suppliers, markets and competitors; the wider environment includes factors such as public attitudes, economic and political systems, laws etc;


● employees and other tangible assets – people, plant, and equipment;


● formal organizational requirements – systems designed to regulate the actions of employees (and machines);


● the social system – culture (values and norms) and relationships between employees in terms of power, affiliation and trust;


● technology – the major techniques people use while engaged in organizational processes and that are programmed into machines;


● the dominant coalition – the objectives, strategies, personal characteristics and internal relationships of those who oversee the organization as a whole and control its basic policy making.


Mintzberg (1983b) analysed organizations into five broad types or configurations:


● simple structures, which are dominated by the top of the organization with centralized decision making;


● machine bureaucracy, which is characterized by the standardization of work processes and the extensive reliance on systems;


● professional bureaucracy, where the standardization of skills provides the prime coordinating mechanism;


● divisionalized structures, in which authority is drawn down from the top and activities are grouped together into units which are then managed according to their standardized outputs;


● adhocracies, where power is decentralized selectively to constellations of work that are free to coordinate within and between themselves by mutual adjustments


Drucker (1988) points out that organizations have established, through the development of new technology and the extended use of knowledge workers, ‘that whole layers of management neither make decisions nor lead. Instead, their main, if not their only, function, is to serve as relays – human boosters for the faint, unfocused signals that pass for communications in the traditional pre-information organization’.


Pascale (1990) believes that the new organizational paradigm functions as follows:


● from the image of organizations as machines, with the emphasis on concrete strategy, structure and systems, to the idea of organizations as organisms, with the emphasis on the ‘soft’ dimensions – style, staff and shared values;


● from a hierarchical model, with step-by-step problem solving, to a network model, with parallel nodes of intelligence which surround problems until they are eliminated;


● from the status-driven view that managers think and workers do as they are told, to a view of managers as ‘facilitators’, with workers empowered to initiate improvements and change;


● from an emphasis on ‘vertical tasks’ within functional units, to an emphasis on ‘horizontal tasks’ and collaboration across units;


● from a focus on ‘content’ and the prescribed use of specific tools and techniques, to a focus on ‘process’ and a holistic synthesis of techniques;


● from the military model to a commitment model.


Handy (1989) describes two types of organization: the ‘shamrock’ and the federal


The shamrock organization consists of three elements: 1) the core workers (the central leaf of the shamrock) – professionals, technicians and managers; 2) the contractual fringe – contract workers; and 3) the flexible labour force consisting of temporary staff.


The federal organization takes the process of decentralization one stage further by establishing every key operational, manufacturing or service provision activity as a distinct, federated unit.