According to Mintzberg's theory, what are the five forms of organizational structure

Mintzberg's Five Elements of Organization

Henry Mintzberg's Five Elements of Organization

Henry? Mintzberg is often regarded as the master of organization studies. But it was not until July 2007 that his famous book, The Effective Organization, was published in Chinese. The book was first published in English in 1983, and 24 years later he says in the preface to the Chinese edition of the book, in no uncertain terms, "This book is a great success for me, and I like its internal coherence and its framework for classifying different types of organizations."

Since the mid-1970s, Mintzberg has been organizing the treatise on organizations, distilling its main ideas, and attempting to paint a panoramic picture of the theory of organizational structure.In 1979, he completed a monumental work, The Construction of Organizations of All Kinds: A Comprehensive Study. A few years later, he built on this pedagogical reference book and wrote The Fruitful Organization. The author explains that this book was written specifically for practitioners who need to structure their organizations in hopes of giving them wise guidance.

The book's original English title is Structure in Fives: Designing Effective Organizations, and the Chinese translation is largely a mistranslation. Mintzberg believes that there is no such thing as an "effective organization," only the right one. So what kind of business organization is an appropriate organization? An organization that is coherent and consistent with the context in which it operates (these contextual factors include the size of the organization, the history of the organization, the business environment, the technological systems used by the organization, etc.).

The number "five" recurs in the discussion of organizational design: the five coordination mechanisms, the five basic components of an organization, and the five organizational structures. The number "five" seems to have a strange meaning in the mind of Mintzberg, a Jew. He even quoted from the Dictionary of Symbols: "Five" is the symbol of man ...... and the symbol of the universe ...... symbolizing the will of God and the pursuit of order and perfection. Even the colorful clouds and the five elements in the Chinese context are used by him to prove the wonder of "five". Therefore, the Chinese translation of this book should be "The Organization of the Five Elements".

The Five Coordination Mechanisms

For Mintzberg, the so-called organizational structure is "the sum of the ways in which work is broken down into a number of different tasks and then coordinated and integrated in order to achieve the work's goals."

The basic methods of coordinating work in an organization, according to Mintzberg, can be roughly divided into five: mutual regulation, direct supervision, standardization of work processes, standardization of work output, and standardization of employee skills.

Mutual regulation means that work can be coordinated through simple communication. In the simplest of organizations, this is the most common means of coordination, such as between paddlers in a canoe or several master potters in a pottery workshop. Interestingly, it can also be applied in extremely complex organizations. Mintzberg cites the Apollo program as an example. The first human landing on the moon, with no established precedent to draw on, was characterized by an incredibly fine division of work, with thousands of specialists working on different tasks, and no one initially knowing what to do. As the work progressed, knowledge grew, and much of what made it successful in the end remained the ability of the experts to adapt to each other on the road not yet known. Mintzberg says, "It's no different than two oarsmen needing to coordinate with each other." But after the organization has grown to a certain number of members, mutual adjustment is no longer sufficient for the proper functioning of the organization, and at this point a conductor inevitably emerges. He issues instructions to the others and supervises their work, a form of coordination known as direct supervision.

Direct supervision is also limited by size, the leader's energy is limited, an organization of ten or so people, perhaps he can still play around, more people, I am afraid that it will not be able to do. At this time, the organization will appear stratification, that is, the emergence of intermediate management, at the same time the organization members of the work will appear standardization tendency.

If the work itself is monotonous, such as an assembly line where one worker repeats one action thousands of times a day, and another worker repeats another action thousands of times a day, then the process can be said to be controlled. Through rules and regulations, many of the problems are solved, and at best, another Tyro-type figure emerges to figure out how to make the action more efficient all day long and then institutionalize it. This type of work coordination is workflow standardization.

If the workflow is so complex that it is uncontrollable, then the role of the system is not obvious, then only through the control of the work output (i.e., work results) to achieve the purpose of coordinating work. For a back of the information and samples running around the world of marketing personnel, managers that can not always monitor what he did, with a strict system to provide him how to work is also unwise. Only to tell him clearly, this month's sales to achieve how much, as for how to achieve, their own to see how to do.

There are jobs that cannot be standardized either in themselves or in their results, so the organization can only achieve work coordination by standardizing the skills of its employees. For example, pottery factories hire pottery workers directly from schools, and hospitals hire doctors directly. Mintzberg cites the example of "anesthesiologists and surgeons who remove a patient's appendix with little or no communication; by virtue of their training, they know what instruments to take from each other."

It's interesting how these five coordination mechanisms form a cycle as the job or organization becomes more complex.

The five basic components of an organization

The result of the split is that the organization becomes structured, and while different organizations have different structure charts, the five components are by and large present unless the organization is very small. These five components are the operational core, the strategic top, the middle line, the technical structure, and the support staff.

The operational core consists of those at the lowest level, the operators, who provide production and services. Examples include front-line workers, front-line salespeople and front-line after-sales service personnel. The operational core tends to undergo the most thorough standardization, which Mintzberg says is done to ensure that the work is free from external interference. The degree of standardization varies, of course, depending on the nature of the work; assembly workers and university professors are both operators, but the former work far more standardized than the latter. In addition to the operational core, organizations need to have management, which consists of the strategic top, the middle line, and the technical structure.

Responsible for ensuring that the organization achieves its mission efficiently and effectively, and serves those who control or have power over the organization by providing the services it needs, is Mintzberg's description of the strategic top. The role of the strategy top, in addition to communicating with stakeholders outside the organization and formulating organizational strategy, is to directly supervise, if the organization even needs such a coordinating mechanism. This coordination mechanism for top management means allocating resources, issuing directives, approving major decisions, resolving disputes, designing the organization, recruiting people, monitoring performance, and motivating employees.

The middle line, the collection of middle managers, is between the strategic top level and the operational core, relying on the chain of management on the middle line, which is connected to each other through formal authority. In this hierarchical structure, middle managers perform a range of tasks in direct supervisory streams up and down the hierarchy. They are expected to gather feedback on the unit's performance and present a portion of it to higher-level managers, and they are also involved in a portion of the decision-making.

The technical structure consists of analysts who serve the organization by influencing the work of others. They include work researchers who standardize work processes, such as industrial engineers; planning and control analysts who standardize work outputs, such as long-range planners, quality control engineers, and accountants; and people analysts who standardize employee skills, such as trainers and recruiters. Often, technical structures exist at all levels of the organization.

And the units on the organizational chart that are not in the workflow and are dedicated to providing support are the support staff, such as legal counsel, research and development, receptionists, and the employee cafeteria, to name a few. Technical and support staff are collectively referred to by Mintzberg as functional staff (Figure 1).

The five departments make up an organization chart in the general sense, a chart that does not reveal informal relationships, but it does show the division of work in a simple and clear way. One can tell from the diagram what positions there are in the organization, how these positions make up the various units, and how formal power flows through them.

The Five Organizational Structures

Mintzberg has broken down organizations into "parts" -- configurations that he has examined one by one -- and now he's finally going to put them together into different organizations. Each of the five basic components of an organization exerts a traction on the organization for the "motive" of maximizing "power". Most organizations are pulled by all five forces at the same time. Since the situation always favors one side over the other, the organization will eventually take on five different shapes (Figure 2). These five forms are the simple structure, the mechanical bureaucratic structure, the professional bureaucratic structure, the divisional structure, and the amoeba structure.

The simple structure is not sophisticated enough. Generally, it has a small, if any, technical structure. The organization has few support staff, a lax division of labor, little differentiation between units, and few management levels. It seldom regulates employee behavior and training is minimal. Coordination in a simple structure is accomplished largely by direct supervision, and executive authority for important matters is often centralized in the hands of the chief executive officer. Therefore, the strategic top is the most critical part of this structure. In practice, simple structures tend to consist of a bare-bones strategic hierarchy with a flexible and organic operational core. Simple structures tend to operate in simple and volatile environments, and most organizations adopt them in their infancy. When an organization is hit by a sudden crisis event, whatever structure it normally adopts will temporarily return to the simple structure.

The configuration of design parameters in a mechanical bureaucratic structure is always the same, and work is highly specialized and routine. Procedures at the core of operations are highly regulated. Regulations permeate every corner of the organization. Unit sizes are large at the operational level (shop stewards can manage hundreds of workers). Subgroups are functionally oriented and decision-making is relatively centralized. Administration is well structured, with a clear separation between operational and functional departments. Since the mechanical bureaucratic structure relies heavily on the standardization of operational work processes for coordination, the position of the technical structure (organizational analysts and system developers) is significant in this type of organization. Because of the ubiquity of rules and regulations, there is a strong focus on formal communication at all levels. Decision-making also tends to follow formal chains of authority. It is an organizational structure obsessed with control, with most of the power in the hands of executives, and a technical structure in which analysts have access to some decentralized power. The environment in which it operates tends to be simple and stable. Bureaucratic organizational structures tend to have work routinized so that it can be normalized.

The coordination of a professional-style bureaucracy relies heavily on standardization of skills as well as training and indoctrination. It has to hire professionals to take care of the operational core and give them sizable control over their work. These organizations remain bureaucratic, and its coordination mechanisms, like the bureaucratic structure, are achieved by design, through predefined standards. Bureaucracy is not pejorative in management terms, it is simply a more formal term for hierarchy. Mechanical bureaucratic structures rely on positional power, and professional bureaucratic structures provide power derived from specialized power derived from specialized competence. Such structures are highly decentralized in both vertical and horizontal directions. Organizations such as those of doctors and university professors are precisely professional bureaucracies.

In a divisional structure, the top of the middle line is grouped according to the market. The decentralization and duplication of operational functions minimizes interdependence between divisions, so that each division can operate as a quasi-independent entity without the need to coordinate with other divisions. But the decentralization required in a divisional manufacturing structure is highly restricted and is nothing more than the delegation of authority from a few managers in the headquarters to a few managers in the division. In other words, what the divisional manufacturing structure requires is a parallel, limited vertical decentralization. Headquarters allows the division near-total autonomy to make decisions and to monitor the results of those decisions after the fact. The main coordinating mechanism of the divisional structure is the standardization of work output, and the performance control system is its key design parameter, with which it works best, or rides on the back of, the mechanical bureaucratic structure.

Complex innovations require a fifth type of configuration, which is quite different from the previous structures, and which is able to combine experts from different disciplines into special project teams that work smoothly. Mintzberg borrows from Alvin. Mintzberg calls it the "amoeba structure," borrowing a phrase from Alvin Toffler's book Future Shock. The amoeba structure is quite flexible, with a low degree of behavioral standardization, allowing experts to be organized into functional units for day-to-day management, but working in small market-based project teams. This structure relies on liaison mechanisms to facilitate mutual regulation within and between teams and selective decentralization within the organization. Their main job is to innovate, which means breaking away from existing models, so the innovation organization cannot rely on any standardized model for coordination. The traditional principle of unity of command is despised in such organizations. Teams are organized around projects, and experts rely on knowledge for power.

Mintzberg, meanwhile, sees any model as a simplistic response to the real world, and this guru of management practices doesn't ignore the complexity in real organizations. In his eyes, the five structures only appear when the components of the organization are overwhelmingly dominant in them; they are a borderline case. Real organizations are often characterized by several different organizational structures at the same time. For managers, comparing these ideal organizational structures with their own organizations can give them a deeper understanding of the current state of the organization and allow them to make improvements or choose a more appropriate organizational structure. As for the reality of the organizational structure is often subject to conditions, a fashionable organizational structure may not be appropriate, the innovation of the "amoeba structure" added to the manufacturing plant, the results will often be laughable.