Socio-Environmental Pressures and Its Reflections on the Organizational Structure

Abstract

The companies operate in institutionalized environments, whose constituent elements, organized in institutional systems, exert pressure on them, causing them to change their structure. Therefore, in order to ensure their survival, companies devise an adequate organizational structure to meet the pressures, creating executive committees, technical committees, advisory areas and technical areas. In this sense, the objective of this research is to understand how and why companies modify their organizational structure to meet socio-environmental pressures. The theories adopted are the Institutional Theory and the New Institutional Sociology and the methodology is the multiple case study, data collection with semi-structured interview and Construction of the Explanation for the analysis of the data. The results indicated that an organizational structure is designed with more hierarchical levels for the environmental dimension and less for the social dimension.