Designing an Enabling Structure and Culture

Chapter ten examines management theories about designing an organization and the management skill of creating an enabling structural and cultural context. First, the formal design of an organization is represented by its structure. Just as a person’s physical anatomy influences his or her capability to enact different strategies, so too does an organization’s configuration influence the actions of its employees. However organizations can play the proverbial Dr. Frankenstein by redeploying or adding/subtracting resources and altering the manner in which they are linked together to build a variety of distinct systems. These organizational schemes will then alter the workplace environment to trigger different types of behaviors. For instance, firms can break up jobs into smaller or bigger pieces, connect them more or less closely, establish many or few rules, and concentrate more or less power at the top. These design decision will in turn enable drastically different officially sanctioned patterns of work such as those observed in the highly programmed apparatus of a bureaucratic machine or the fluid and flexible laboratory of an innovative pioneer. Second, supplementing a firm’s formal structure is its informal configuration of organizational culture. Some refer to it as the organization’s personality or “invisible” structure. Corporate culture is based on deeply held beliefs of a firm, manifest in its core values, and shows up in its rites, rituals, stories, and symbol artifacts.