The elements of organizational structuring-which show a curious tendency to appear in five's-suggest a typology of five basic configurations: Simple Structure, Machine Bureaucracy, Professional Bureaucracy, Divisionalized Form, and Adhocracy.

The elements include 1 five basic parts of the organization-the operating core, strategic apex, middle line, technostructure, and support staff; 2 five basic mechanisms of coordination-mutual adjustment, direct supervision, and the standardization of work processes, outputs, and skills; 3 the design parameters-job specialization, behavior formalization, training and indoctrination, unit grouping, unit size, action planning and performance control systems, liaison devices such as integrating managers, teams, task forces, and matrix structure, vertical decentralization delegation to line managers, and horizontal decentralization power sharing by nonmanagers; and 4 the contingency factors-age and size, technical system, environment, and power.

Each of the five configurations relies on one of the five coordinating mechanism and tends to favor one of the five parts. In Simple Structure, the key part is the strategic apex, which coordinates by direct supervision; the structure is minimally elaborated and highly centralized; it is associated with simple, dynamic environments and strong leaders, and tends to be found in smaller, younger organizations or those facing severe crises. The Machine Bureaucracy coordinates primarily by the imposition of work standards from the technostructure; jobs are highly specialized and formalized, units functional and very large at the operating level, power centralized vertically at the strategic apex with limited horizontal decentralization to the technostructure; this structure tends to be found in simple, stable environments, and is often associated with older, larger organizations, sometimes externally controlled, and mass production technical systems. The Professional Bureaucracy relies on the standardization of skills in its operating core for coordination; jobs are highly specialized but minimally formalized, training is extensive and grouping is on a concurrent functional and market basis, with large sized operating units, and decentralization is extensive in both the vertical and horizontal dimensions; this structure is typically found in complex but stable environments, with technical systems that are simple and non-regulating. In the Divisionalized Form, a good deal of power is delegated to market-based units in the middle line limited vertical decentralization, whose efforts are coordinated by the standardization of outputs, through the extensive use of performance control systems; such structures are typically found in very large, mature organizations, above all operating in diversified markets. Adhocracy coordinates primarily by mutual adjustment among all of its parts, calling especially for the collaboration of its support staff; jobs are specialized, involving extensive training but little formalization, units are small and combine functional and market bases in matrix structures, liaison devices are used extensively, and the structure is decentralized selectively in both the vertical and horizontal dimensions; these structures are found in complex, dynamic environments, and are often associated with highly sophisticated and automated technical systems.

In conclusion, it is claimed that the effective Organization will favor some sort of configuration-some type of a logically consistent clustering of its elements-as it searches for harmony in its internal processes and consonance with its environment. But some organizations will inevitably be driven to hybrid structures as they react to contradictory pressures or while they effect a transition from one configuration to another, and here too it is believed that the typology of five can serve as a diagnostic tool in organizational design.

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Structure in 5's: A Synthesis of the Research on Organization Design

The literature on the management of R&D professionals strongly advocates managing R&D projects on a project-by-project basis. This literature suggests that projects should be managed differently depending upon project characteristics such as risk, ambiguity, and nonroutineness. While the primary emphasis of the R&D professional literature has been on project teams, the purpose of this study is to examine the impact of organization-wide controls on innovativeness at the firm level.In a sample of 57 pharmaceutical firms, this study investigates the influence of organizational controls on the research and development activities of R&D professionals. This study is one of a handful of studies that simultaneously explores the use of input, behavior, and output controls. Two categories of innovation are considered as dependent variables: incremental innovations in the form of drug enhancements and radical innovations in the form of new drugs. Contrary to existing theory and hypotheses developed in this study, the results show that input, behavior, and output control enhanced radical innovation, and input and output controls enhanced incremental innovation.These results challenge several important features of existing models of R&D management and diverge from common beliefs about R&D management at the project level. While it is commonly accepted that incremental and radical innovation should be managed differently, the results of this study suggest otherwise. In this instance, the management of R&D activities may be considered more similar than previously thought.

Technological Innovation in the Pharmaceutical Industry: The Use of Organizational Control in Managing Research and Development

The authors would like to thank Jean-Marie Toulouse and Jeannine Robichaud for their help with the data gathering and sample design, Richard Germain for his advice and analytical contributions to the LISREL analysis, Morty Yalovsky, Peter H. Friesen, Donald C. Hambrick, Alex Whitmore, and Richard P. Bagozzi for their suggestions, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Government of Quebec FCAC program, respectively, for grants #494-84-0012 and #EQ1 867. A study was undertaken to examine the relationships of chief executive need for achievement and the traditional contingencies of size, technology, and environmental uncertaintywith organizational structure. A number of models relating the structural constructs of formalization, centralization, and integration with their hypothesized determinants were examined using LISREL and multipleregression analyses. CEO need for achievement and size were found to have the strongest relationships to most structural constructs; technology and uncertainty had very little impact on structure. The relationships between need for achievement and structure were usually highest in samples of small and young firms, suggesting that CEO personality might be influencing structure, rather than the reverse.

Psychological and Traditional Determinants of Structure.

This study suggests that organizational structures and strategy-making processes are highly interdependent and must be complementary in many ways to ensure good performance under challenging condit...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/255893.pdf

Strategy Making and Structure: Analysis and Implications for Performance

Theorists have often acknowledged the importance of equifinality in organization design and, in recent years, several studies have demonstrated the concept empirically. This article exposes the assumptions regarding function and structure that underlie contingency theory and develops a functional equivalence view of design. By examining the degree of conflict in functional demands together with the latitude of structural options available, we reveal and describe three different types of equifinality: suboptimal. tradeoff, and configurational. The functional equivalence approach implies a different agenda and emphasis for research on structure and design and has normative implications for how managers should design to achieve performance.

Equifinality: Functional Equivalence in Organization Design

1 An earlier version of this article was presented at the Eastern Academy of Management Meetings in Philadelphia, May 1973. The author is grateful to Professor Anant Negandhi for his help and encouragement. The results of a comparative study of 19 United States manufacturing organizations using the Aston group's four abbreviated structural scales and seven other measures support the concept of a multidimensional bureaucratic structure space. Factor and cluster analyses yielded three independent dimensions of decentralization, specialization, and formalization. The results are interpreted to suggest not only that a multidimensional model of bureaucracy is superior to the unidimensional Weberian one, but that the dimensionality of the bureaucratic structure space may be a function of the socio-cultural environment of the organization unit being examined. The results imply that bureaucratic structure may conform to the equifinality principle, in that a variety of structural arrangements appear to be equally viable strategies for the various sample organizations.'

Bernard C. Reimann

Papers

On the Dimensions of Bureaucratic Structure: An Empirical Reappraisal