Building better bureaucracies

Executive Overview Colloquially speaking, bureaucracy means red tape, over-controlling bosses, and apathetic employees. But large-scale organizations need appropriately designed formalized procedures and hierarchical structure to avoid chaos and assure efficiency, quality, and timeliness. We currently lack theoretical or practical guidelines for building better bureaucracies that can support high levels of both performance and employee involvement. This article combines insights from organization theory and cognitive psychology research on technology to propose a set of organization design guidelines.