Mintzberg's Taxonomy of Organizational Forms

by Fred Beshears [ Return ]

According to Henry Mintzberg, an organization's structure is largely determined by the variety one finds in its environment. For Mintzberg, environmental variety is determined by both environmental complexity and the pace of change. He identifies four types of organizational form, which are associated with four combinations of complexity and change.

To help explain each of the four organizational forms, Mintzberg defines five basic organizational subunits.

Subunit Strategic Apex Technostructure Support Staff Middle Line Operating Core

Basic Subunits Example positions from a manufacturing firm. Board of Directors, Chief Executive Officer Strategic Planning, Personnel Training, Operations Research, Systems Analysis and Design Legal Counsel, Public Relations, Payroll, Mailroom Clerks, Cafeteria Workers VP Operations, VP Marketing, Plant Managers Sales Managers Purchasing Agents, Machine Operators, Assemblers, Sales Persons, Shippers

Each of the four organizational forms in Mintzberg's scheme depend on fundamentally different mechanisms for coordination.

Organizational Form Machine Bureaucracy Entrepreneurial Startup Adhocracy

Coordination Mechanism Standardize procedures and outputs Direct supervision and control Mutual adjustment of ad-hoc teams

Professional Organization Standardize professional skills and norms

And, in each particular form, different subunits tend to have greater influence. Machine Bureaucracy Professional Organization Entrepreneurial Startup Adhocracy Technocrats standardize procedures and outputs Professionals in the operating core (e.g. doctors, professors) rely on roles and skills learned from years of schooling and indoctrination to coordinate their work Managers in the strategic apex directly supervise the work of subordinates. Teams of professionals from the operating core, support staff, and technostructure rely on informal "mutual adjustment" to coordinate their efforts. In administrative adhocracies, the low-level operations maybe totally automated.

The Organizational Structure of the University

The University is a Professional Organization, but "support units" may be composed of other forms. For example, support subunits that perform routine functions may have machine bureaucratic managements, but technocratic subunits may be administered as professional organizations or adhocracies. As the university struggles to cope with new information technologies, its overall organizational form may tend towards adhocracy. But, the stress of working in an adhocracy puts pressure on the organization to organize subunits according to one of the other forms.

Finally, professional orientation toward service and a bureaucratic orientation toward disciplined compliance with procedures are opposite approaches to work and create conflict in professional organizations.

Selected Passages from "Structure in Fives: Designing Effective Organizations" and "The Strategy Process: Concepts, Contexts, Cases" by Henry Mintzberg

The Entrepreneurial Startup (the simple structure)

The simple structure is characterized, above all, by what is not elaborated. Typically, it has little or no technostructure, few support staffers, a loose division of labor, minimal differentiation among its units, and a small managerial hierarchy. Little of its behavior is formalized, and it makes minimal use of planning, training, and liaison devices. Coordination in the simple structure is effected largely by direct supervision. Specifically, power over all important decisions tends to be centralized in the hands of the chief executive officer. Thus, the strategic apex emerges as the key part of the structure; indeed, the structure often consists of little more than a one-person strategic apex and an organic operating core. Most organizations pass through the simple structure in their formative years. The environment of the simple structure tends to be at one and the same time simple and dynamic. A simple environment can be comprehended by a single individual, and so enables decision making to be controlled by that individual. A dynamic environment

means organic structure: Because its future state cannot be predicted, the organization cannot effect coordination by standardization. Another condition common to simple structures is a technical system that is both nonsophisticated and non-regulating. Sophisticated ones require elaborate staff support structures, to which power over technical decisions must be delegated, and regulating ones call for bureaucratization of the operating core.

The Machine Bureaucracy

A clear configuration of the design parameters has held up consistently in the research: highly specialized, routine operating tasks; very formalized procedures in the operating core; a proliferation of rules, regulations, and formalized communication throughout the organization; large-sized units at the operating level; reliance on the functional basis for grouping tasks; relatively centralized power for decision making; and an elaborate administrative structure with sharp distinctions between line and staff. Because the machine bureaucracy depends primarily on the standardization of its operating work processes for coordination, the technostructure - which houses the analysts who do the standardizing - emerges as the key part of the structure. Machine bureaucratic work is found, above all, in environments that are simple and stable. The work of complex environments cannot be rationalized into simple tasks, and that of dynamic environments cannot be predicted, made repetitive, and so standardized. The machine bureaucracy is typically found in the mature organization, large enough to have the volume of operating work needed for repetition and standardization, and old enough to have been able to settle on the standards it wishes to use. Machine bureaucracies tend also to be identified with regulating technical systems, since these routinize work and so enable it to be formalized. The managers at the strategic apex of these organizations are concerned in large part with the fine-tuning of their bureaucratic machines. These are "performance organizations" not "problem solving" ones. Theirs is a perpetual search for more efficient ways to produce given outputs. Thus, the entrepreneur function takes on a very restricted form at the strategic apex.

The Professional Bureaucracy

The professional bureaucracy relies for coordination on the standardization of skills and its associated design parameter, training and indoctrination. It hires duly trained and indoctrinated specialists -professionals- for the operating core, and then gives them considerable control over their work. Control over his own work means that the professional works relatively independently of his colleagues, but closely with the clients he serves. Most necessary coordination between the operating professionals is handled by

the standardization of skills and knowledge - in effect, by what they have learned to expect from their colleagues. Whereas the machine bureaucracy generates its own standards - its technostructure designing the work standards for its operators and its line managers enforcing them - the standards of the professional bureaucracy originate largely outside its own structure, in the self-governing association its operators join with their colleagues from other professional bureaucracies. The professional bureaucracy emphasizes authority of a professional nature - the power of expertise. The strategies of the professional bureaucracy are largely ones of the individual professionals within the organization as well as of the professional associations on the outside. The professional bureaucracy's own strategies represent the cumulative effect over time of the projects, or strategic "initiatives," that its members are able to convince it to undertake. The technical system cannot be highly regulating, certainly not highly automated. The professional resists the rationalization of his skills - their division into simply executed steps - because that makes them programmable by the technostructure, destroys his basis of autonomy, and drives the structure to the machine bureaucratic form. Like the machine bureaucracy, the professional bureaucracy is an inflexible structure, well suited to producing its standard outputs but ill-suited to adapting to the production of new ones. Change in the professional bureaucracy does not sweep in from new administrators taking office to announce major reforms. Rather, change seeps in by the slow process of changing the professionals - changing who can enter the profession, what they learn in its professional schools (norms as well as skills and knowledge), and thereafter how willing they are to upgrade their skills.

The Adhocracy (the innovative organization)

In adhocracy, we have highly organic structure, with little formalization of behavior; job specialization based on formal training; a tendency to group the specialists in functional units for housekeeping purposes but to deploy them in small, market-based project teams to do their work; a reliance on liaison devices to encourage mutual adjustment, the key coordinating mechanism, within and between these teams. To innovate means to break away from established patterns. So the innovative organization cannot rely on any form of standardization for coordination. Of all the configurations, adhocracy shows the least reverence for the classical principles of management, especially unity of command. The adhocracy must hire and give power to experts - professionals whose knowledge and skills have been highly developed in training programs.

Unlike the professional bureaucracy, the adhocracy cannot rely on the standardized skills of these experts to achieve coordination, because that would lead to standardization instead of innovation. Rather, it must treat existing knowledge and skills merely as bases on which to build new ones. Moreover, the building of new knowledge and skills requires the combination of different bodies of existing knowledge. So rather than allowing the specialization of the expert or the differentiation of the functional unit to dominate its behavior, the adhocracy must instead break through the boundaries of conventional specialization and differentiation. Whereas each professional in the professional bureaucracy can operate on his own, in the adhocracy professionals must amalgamate their efforts. In adhocracies the different specialists must join forces in multi-disciplinary teams, each formed around a specific project of innovation. Managers abound in the adhocracy - functional managers, integrating managers, project managers. The last named are particularly numerous, since the project teams must be small to encourage mutual adjustment among their members, and each team needs a designated leader, a "manager." Managers become functioning members of project teams, with special responsibility to effect coordination between them. To the extent that direct supervision and formal authority diminish in importance, the distinction between line and staff blurs. To proceed with our discussion and to elaborate on how the innovative organization makes decisions and forms strategies, we need to distinguish two basic forms that it takes. The Operating Adhocracy The operating adhocracy innovates and solves problems directly on behalf of its clients. Its multidisciplinary teams of experts often work under contract, as in the think-tank consulting firm, creative advertising agency, or manufacturer of engineering prototypes. A key feature of the operating adhocracy is that its administrative and operating work tend to blend into a single effort. That is, in ad hoc project work it is difficult to separate the planning and design of the work from its execution. Both require the same specialized skills, on a project-by-project basis. Thus it can be difficult to distinguish the middle levels of the organization from its operating core, since line managers and staff specialists may take their place alongside operating specialists on project teams. The Administrative Adhocracy The second type of adhocracy also functions with project teams, but toward a different end. Whereas the operating adhocracy undertakes projects to serve its clients, the administrative adhocracy undertakes projects to serve itself, to bring new facilities or activities on line, as in the administrative structure of a highly automated company. And in sharp contrast to the operating adhocracy, the administrative adhocracy makes a clear distinction between its administrative component and its operating core. The core is

truncated - cut right off from the rest of the organization - so that the administrative component that remains can be structured as an adhocracy. This truncation may take place in a number of ways. First, when the operations have to be machinelike and so could impede innovation in the administration (because of the associated need for control), it may be established as an independent organization. Second, the operating core may be done away with altogether - in effect, contracted out to other organizations. A third form of truncation arises when the operating core becomes automated. This enables it to run itself, largely independent of the need for direct controls from the administrative component, leaving the latter free to structure itself as an adhocracy to bring new facilities on line or to modify old ones. With this change in the operating work force comes a dramatic change in structure: the operating core transcends a state of bureaucracy - in a sense it becomes totally bureaucratic, totally standardized, ... and the administration shifts its orientation completely. The rules, regulations, and standards are now built into machines, not workers. And machines never become alienated, no matter how demeaning their work. So out goes the need for direct supervision and technocratic standardization and with it the obsession with control. And in comes a corps of technical specialists, to design the technical system and then maintain it.