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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.
Basic Subunits
Subunit
Strategic Apex
Technostructure Strategic Planning, Personnel Training, Operations Research, Systems Analysis and Design
Support Staff
Middle Line
Operating Core
Each of the four organizational forms in Mintzberg's scheme depend on fundamentally different mechanisms
for coordination.
Organizational Form
Machine Bureaucracy
Coordination Mechanism
Standardize procedures and outputs
Adhocracy
And, in each particular form, different subunits tend to have greater influence.
Machine Bureaucracy
Professional Organization
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
Entrepreneurial Startup
Adhocracy
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 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.
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 multidisciplinary 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
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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.