Читать книгу Reframing Organizations - Lee G. Bolman - Страница 55

Until the mid‐twentieth century, most big companies were functionally organized. Responding to strategic complexity during the late 1950s and early 1960s, many companies shed their functional structures in favor of divisional forms pioneered by DuPont and General Motors in the 1920s. Beginning in the mid‐1960s, many organizations in complex environments began to develop matrix structures in which individuals and units have more than one reporting structure. Matrix structures are often cumbersome (Davis and Lawrence, 1978; Peters, 1979), but can solve many problems when organizations figure out how to make them work (Vantrappen and Wirtz, 2016). By the mid‐1990s, Asea Brown Boveri (ABB), the Swiss‐based electrical engineering giant, had grown to encompass some 1,300 separate companies and more than 200,000 employees worldwide. To hold this complex collection together, ABB developed a matrix structure crisscrossing approximately 100 countries with about 65 business sectors (Rappaport, 1992). Each subsidiary reported to both a country manager (Sweden, Germany, and so on) and a sector manager (power transformers, transportation, and the like).

The design carried the inevitable risk of confusion, tension, and conflict between sector and country managers. ABB aimed for structural cohesion at the top with a small executive coordinating committee (9 members from seven countries at the beginning of 2021), an elite cadre of some 500 global managers, and a policy of communicating in English, even though it was a second language for most employees. Variations on ABB's structure—a matrix with business or product lines on one axis and countries or regions on another—are common in global corporations. Familiar brands like Amazon, Google, and Starbucks use matrix structures to support their business (Bradt, 2018).