Structure in fives : designing effective organizations

Every organized human activity, from the making of pots to the placing of a man on the moon, gives rise to two fundamental and opposing requirements: the division of labor into various tasks to be performed, and the coordination of these tasks to accomplish the activity. 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 these tasks. The elements of structure should be selected to achieve an internal consistency or harmony, as well as basic consistency with the organization's situation. This leads us to the conclusion that both the design parameters and the situational factors should be clustered to create what we call configurations. The central theme of this 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 organizationel structure - in fact, even the diagnosis of problems in many ineffective ones - seems to involve the consideration of only a few basic configurations.