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Organization Design
The decision-making process that aligns an organization's structure with its strategic goals and helps ensure that the organization successfully adapts to its external environment. The purpose is to divide the major organizational tasks among parts of the organization (differentiation) and to coordinate the efforts of each part across the organization (integration) in order to accomplish the organization's strategic goals. Design involves dividing requisite tasks into subtasks and assigning subtasks among work units and employees, configuring the flow of work processes, creating coordi nating mechanisms among the units for the completion of tasks, establishing lines of authority, determining spans of control (the number of employees reporting to one supervisor), and determining decision-making responsibility. Organization design is influenced by the organization's technology (Joan Woodward) and the rate ...