Strategic Organizational Diagnosis and Design

Abstract

Preface to the First EditionThis part also contains seven cases specifically developed to be used with Organizational Consultant. For Part 2, Nancy Keeshan is a coauthor.Although Part 1, Part 2, and Organizational Consultant can be considered as a unit, each is self-contained. For instance, Organizational Consultant can also be used with other textbooks in organizational theory such as Robbins (1990), Daft, (1992), and Mintzberg, (1984.Organizational Consultant is a teaching tool in itself. Explanation and help functions contain many parts of the theory. Extensive use ofOrganizational Consultant can teach the student many issues of the theory.The book and software have been developed over some years. We have used both the book and software in many courses both at The Fuqua School of Business and Odense University. We would like to thank our students for valuable comments and critique. Many students developed cases from their own organization as part of the courses and we were allowed to include some ofthese cases in Part 2 of this book. We would like to thank

House of Project Complexity—understanding complexity in large infrastructure projects

“…As the discussion below shows, the frameworks have matured to an extent where complexity is recognized as a broader umbrella concept, and recent literature has mainly argued for what additional sub-concepts should be included, the relationships between those sub concepts and how they could be applied in a practical sense. Most proposals for application exhibit contingency-based approaches (following Shenhar (2001) and Burton & Obel (2004)), however new literature argues that institution-based approaches should also be used to study projects (W. R. Scott, 2012). We trace the evolution of the concept of complexity in projects here.…”

“…They contrasted it with the literature on innovation, which reflected a contingent approach to management of innovation for complex products or services. The particular dichotomized view -incremental versus radical innovationsuggested that organizations performing more innovative tasks (characterized by a greater degree of uncertainty) should be inherently different from those performing routine tasks or producing routine products (Abernathy & Utterback, 1978;Bart, 1988;Burton & Obel, 2004;C. Freeman, 1997).…”

“…A contingent approach to managing projects or structuring them on the basis of their overall complexity requires some systematic differentiation of the nature and degree of complexity along various dimensions (Burton & Obel, 2004;Levitt, 2011). Scott (2012) argues that the features or challenges presented by the normative and cultural-cognitive institutions in the project environment and a sophisticated understanding of the organizational field can better inform the contingency-based project structuring approach.…”

Organizational Design and Restructuring in Response to Crises: Lessons from Computational Modeling and Real-World Cases

“…Task Environment. We define the collection of task problems as the task environment, which provides external sources of information to the organization (Aldrich 1979, Burton and Obel 2004, Dill 1958, Mackenzie 1978. Task environments vary on a number of dimensions, with focus often being on complexity and uncertainty (Anderson and Tushman 2001) that are fundamentally about the interrelationships among and diversity of the components of task environments (Aldrich 1979, Hannan and Freeman 1977, Roberts 1990, Simon 1962, ZeyFerrell 1979.…”

“…nizations (Courtright et al 1989, Miles andCreed 1995). Each type of structure has been analyzed by various research traditions, but the structural impact on performance has rarely been contrasted systematically, with perhaps the exception of Burton and Obel (2004), Carley andLin (1995, 1997), and Lin and Carley (1997). For this study, we categorize organizational form as simple or complex (Table 2).…”