Organizational Structure, Assessment Of

Introduction

The structure of organizations has long been a point of study for those interested in organizational sciences. In the 1960s and early to mid-1970s, the focus was on how the work the organization performed and the technology used to do the work was related to the structure of the organization. Other early foci included how the structure of the organization was related to so-called ‘contextual’ factors, including the size of the organization as well as its environment. These early investigations of organizational structure are usually placed under the rubric of contingency theory. Although these early writings on and studies of organizational structure often had the goal of being able to make generalizations about structure and its determinants across a multitude of sectors, this ambitious goal ...