Читать книгу Reframing Organizations - Lee G. Bolman - Страница 81

As the two‐dimensional lines and boxes of a traditional organization chart have become increasingly archaic, students of organizational design have developed a variety of new structural images. One influential example is Mintzberg's five‐sector “logo,” depicted in Exhibit 4.1. Mintzberg's model clusters various functions into groupings and displays their relative size and influence in response to different strategies and external circumstances. His schema provides a rough atlas of the fundamental terrain that can help managers get their bearings. It assists in sizing up the lay of the land before assembling a structure that conforms to prevailing circumstances. One of the distinctive features of Mintzberg's image is expanding the typical two‐dimensional view of structure into a more expansive rendering that provides a sharper image of the intricacy and issues of organization design.

Exhibit 4.1. Mintzberg's Model.

Source: Mintzberg (1979, p. 20). Copyright ©1979. Reprinted by permission of Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ.

At the base of Mintzberg's image is the operating core, consisting of workers (agents) who produce or provide products or services directly to customers or clients: teachers in schools, assembly‐line workers in factories, physicians and nurses in hospitals, and flight crews in airlines.

Directly above the operating core is the administrative component: managers who supervise, coordinate, control, and provide resources for the operators. School principals, factory supervisors, and echelons of middle management fulfill this role. At the top of Mintzberg's figure, senior managers in the strategic apex track developments in the environment, determine the strategy, and shape the grand design. In school systems, the strategic apex includes superintendents and school boards. In corporations, nonprofits, and universities, the apex houses the board of directors and senior executives.

Two more components sit alongside the administrative component. The technostructure houses specialists, technicians, and analysts who standardize, measure, and inspect outputs and procedures. Accounting and quality control departments in industry, audit departments in government agencies, and flight standards departments in airlines perform such functions.

The support staff performs tasks that support or facilitate the work of others throughout the organization. In schools, for example, the support staff includes nurses, secretaries, custodians, food service workers, and bus drivers. These people often wield influence far greater than their station might suggest.

From this basic blueprint, Mintzberg (1979) derived five structural configurations: simple structure, machine bureaucracy, professional bureaucracy, divisionalized form, and adhocracy. Each creates its unique set of management challenges.