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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 has yet to be fully realized. Much of the work that followed, including present-day studies, has been focused on particular industries or sectors of organizations. This partially stems from the increasing specialization within the field of organizational sciences, but also is attributable to the contributions of contingency theory: the understanding that not only do the technologies used by organizations differ by such stratifications, but so do the environments in which these organizations are placed (Thompson, 1967). Although there is one set of scales that are widely referenced for their conceptualization of factors that one should consider when assessing organizational structure (Pugh, Hickson, Hinings & Turner, 1968, 1969), there are no standardized scales that are used to study all of the elements of organizational structure across all industries or sectors. What we have instead are scales that would have to be altered and applied to particular industries and psychometrically reassessed, or ‘islands’ of specialized research on organizational structures that are informed by the earlier work done on this topic.

The first goal of this entry is to articulate what is meant by organizational structure. This will be followed by a review of the major set of scales that has been developed to assess organizational structure, and an analysis of how researchers of one sector, health care, have assessed organizational structure.

Defining Organizational Structure

It is important to define what is meant by organizational structure, because the definition(s) can be used to assess the face validity of any measures that a researcher could construct. Definitions of organizational structure can be classified into those that are more conceptual and those that are more operational. On the conceptual level, Mintzberg (1983) defines organizational structure as the ‘… sum total of the ways in which labor is divided into distinct tasks and then its coordination is achieved among these tasks’ (Mintzberg, 1983: 2). The contemporary management literature defines the elements of organizational structure to include the following: formal reporting relationships and levels in the hierarchy, grouping together of individuals into departments and of departments into the total organization, and systems to include effective communication, coordination, and integration of efforts across departments (Daft, 2001: 202). Basically, conceptual definitions of organizational structure specify how the organization is differentiated in terms of tasks, reporting relationships, authority and decision-making responsibility, and how these differentiated elements are integrated to coordinate the work that the organization does.

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