The Science of Organizational Design

This article suggests experimentation as a scientific way to prepare for organizational designs that may not even exist yet. The idea is to perform experiments to "understand the relationship between structure and coordination mechanisms of information, communications, decisions, trust, and incentives - the basis for the multi-contingency theory of organizational design". The value of this article is in the exploration of tasks in terms of function, information processing, and flow. The authors considered both the M-form (multidivisional) and the U-form (functional).

Conclusions

Design and experimentation are moving ahead as natural experiments that explore a portion of the "what might be" space. We are observing closely for insights and understanding. We need to go further to expand the design space and investigate the underlying mechanisms of structure and coordination through experimentation utilizing lab studies, simulations, field studies, and ethnographies, among other approaches. Romme stated that the "idea of a design involves inquiry into systems that do not yet exist - either complete new systems or new states of existing systems". Experimentation is at the heart of the science of organizational design.

Without a science of organizational design, we cannot generalize and use our accumulated knowledge to be able to design effective and efficient organizations that serve their purposes well.