Organizational Design

Broadly defined, an organization consists of two or more people who cooperate with each other to pursue a shared goal, create a product, or perform a service. At the basic level, organizations exist to perform tasks, produce outputs, and/or generate and disseminate information. Educational institutions (e.g., elementary schools, secondary schools, and postsecondary institutions), which are also organizations, exist to perform a variety of functions such as preparing a knowledgeable cadre of individuals to work in a global economy as well as helping citizens live in a democratic society. The degree to which educational leaders utilize organizational design techniques that incorporate researchbased information may help educational leaders to systematically plan and strategically coordinate different levels within the educational institution to produce positive outcomes for all stakeholders involved in the American educational enterprise.

An organizational design can be generally defined as a complex plan and set of approaches, strategies, and techniques used to develop human and technological systems, processes, and structures within an organization that interact and collaborate to produce desired objectives. Jay Galbraith, a leading organizational design theorist, noted that organizational design can be viewed as a series of choices made by management, involving five interrelated policy decisions: (1) strategy, which is the organization's statement of goals and objectives for existence, (2) structure, which refers to the type and functions of the decision-making system in the organization and the outcomes of various decisions regarding the size and complexity in the organization, (3) processes, which relates to the implementation of organizational decisions pertaining to how management and development tasks are achieved, (4) rewards, which is the organization's systematic attempt to link appropriate standards of performance to relevant incentives and emoluments for achieving stated goals, and (5) people, which refers to the guidelines and procedures that dictate acceptable performance standards and operational rules for the individuals who cooperate to complete organizational goals.

Henry Mintzberg, another leading organizational design theorist, also acknowledged that organizational design decisions result in one of five basic organizational configurations: (1) simple structure, which refers to an organization that does not have a specified structure of work processes and procedures to guide the production of work outputs or the delivery of services, (2) machine bureaucracy, an organization with a formal and detailed system defining relevant and appropriate organizational communications and organizational behaviors that are needed to produce desired organizational goals, (3) professional bureaucracy, [Page 715]which can be characterized by organizations such as schools and universities that are based on a series of separate, yet interrelated, departments, structures, and work processes partitioned in distinct units managed by persons with professional expertise based on similar educational credentials and/or relevant experiences, (4) divisionalized form, which is based on the idea that certain units or departments should be managed, grouped, and organized on the basis of a shared output goal, and (5) adhocracy, which refers to an organization that can successfully incorporate the ideas, inputs, and inventions of several individuals into an integrated unit designed to solve new problems and create innovations for a variety of processes, products, and procedures.

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