What Makes for a Well-Designed Organization?

Based on contingency thinking, specific guidelines for the design of an organization should come from its internal and external context. Design criteria are a way to express these guidelines, specific to the organization in question. More generally, there are a number of design principles that can guide organization design efforts, based on the work of various scholars and practitioners. The first principle prescribes that tasks that have a high level of interdependence should be combined into one organizational cluster. In this way, the clusters created have optimal autonomy, thus preventing coordination cost, collaboration problems, and conflict. The second principle is to allocate these autonomous clusters of tasks to teams that are self-sufficient. Self-sufficiency means that teams have the resources, skills, and information at their disposal to perform the tasks assigned to them. Acknowledging and managing the tensions between organizational units is the third principle. Principle four is preventing redundant management layers. The fifth principle is to create enough flexibility in the design to fit the context. And the final guideline is to not overdesign.