ORGANIZATIONAL DESIGN PRINCIPLES (Part 1)

Literature advocating a variety of organizational designs such as “Flat”, “Horizontal,””Matrix,” “Poised,” “Fractal,””Chaordic,” etc., abounds (Argyris, 1955; Resnick and Patti, 1980; Wynn, 1995). However, all these “(re)designs” are nothing but fiddling around the edges of the phenotype of a dominant hierarchy, namely, bureaucracy.

To foster a culture of accountability, wellbeing, and responsibility, where Herzberg’s motivation-hygiene factors are optimally met, where people feel proud of what they do by fully understanding their business instead of simply setting up and following rules and regulations, an enhancive, tropophilic non-dominant hierarchy must be in place.

The work of Lippitt and White (in late 1930’s and early 40’s) and that of Fred Emery (1945–1997) demonstrated that all human organizations make a conscious or unconscious choice between two, and only TWO genotypic and fundamentally different organizational designs:

1) DP1-Bureaucratic (i.e. behaviour-restricting dominant hierarchy)

2) DP2-Participative Democratic (i.e., behaviour-enhancing non-dominant hierarchy)

There is also the choice of Laisser faire, which some believe to be a midpoint between bureaucracy and participative democracy, but it is not! Laisse faire is a non-structure thus not a valid…