Organizational Management

Designing Effective Organizations.

1.Describe the Four Generic Organizational Effectiveness criteria, and also explain what the Contingency Approach to organizational design involves. Discuss Burns and Stalker's findings regarding mechanistic and organic organizations.

The four generic organizational effectiveness criteria are

* Goal accomplishment (satisfying stated objectives),

* Resource acquisition (gathering the necessary productive inputs),

* Internal processes (building and maintaining healthy organizational systems), and

* Strategic constituencies’ satisfaction (achieving at least minimal satisfaction for all key stakeholders).

Contingency theory presently provides a major framework for organizational design. There are, however, several major challenges to it. Contingency theory is said to be static .The contingency theory of organizational structure is said to be obsolete because of new organizational forms, but this lacks credibility. The contingency theory of organizational structure may be referred to more succinctly as structural contingency theory (Pfeffer, 1982). A challenge is that structural contingency theory is static and fails to deal with organizational change and adaptation (Galunic and Eisenhardt, 1994). It is true to say the heart of structural contingency theory is statics, in the sense that it deals with how a static state of fit between structure and contingency causes high performance (Woodward, 1965).

Burns and Stalker (1961) refer to the two fundamental and contrasting organizational forms being discussed during this period as the mechanistic (harking back to the closed, rational organization of Taylor and Simon) and the organic. According to this categorization,

Mechanistic organizations are characterized by large-scale, low-complexity work activities and are best suited to stable environments that do not require adaptive change and innovation.

Organic organizations are characterized by small-scale,...