BUS603: Managing People

The design of an organization has a significant impact on the performance of the organization. Thus, it is important to know how a particular organization should be designed. Van de Ven et al. state: "Much has been learned, and even more needs to be learned, about designing organizations and institutions". Further, they urge scholars to return to the frontier of organization studies by addressing a new agenda in designing organizations with promising new research methods. Levitt suggests that future research on organization design extends the frontiers of organizational micro-contingency theory. Gulati et al., on the other hand, suggest a focus on meta-organization design where organizational design is looked upon in an inter-organizational and community context.

Do we have scientifically based knowledge that can help us design efficient and effective organizations for the future, and is there a science of organizational design? At first, it may seem that science and design are opposites and that the two are not compatible. Science is the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment, while design is a plan or drawing produced to show the look and function or workings of a building, garment, organization, or other object before it is made.

In this paper, we will discuss and present a science of organizational design, including a discussion of models and theories of designing organizations. We argue that experimentation of what is and what might be is the link between science and design for a science of organizational design. We may address the issue of designing organizations by invoking new research methods and new ways of imagining possibilities. However, we should also employ our current knowledge to design new organizations for new conditions. The use of experimentation based on our current knowledge is the way to move forward. This is the only way we can generalize existing knowledge to help design organizations for the future.

The paper will also present a methodology perspective of the science of organization design. We will discuss what we have learned from the science of organization design. Building upon Simon's book The Sciences of the Artificial and related notions, we develop a science of organizational design where the basic organizational design question is how to create a fit between structure and coordination. Structure is to break a big purpose or problem into smaller problems and units. The result is a set of tasks that have to be performed. The coordination is managing these smaller problems, units, and tasks into a whole so that they fit together to achieve an overall purpose. Finally, we discuss questions, which the science of organization design should address in future research.