Organization Design: A Participative Multivariate Approach

Division of labor and coordination have been central to organization design theory ever since organizations became a subject of inquiry (Babbage, 1832, Gulick and Urwick, 1937; Mooney, 1947). Presently popular ideas (Koontz and O'Donnell, 1972; Litterer, 1973) about how division of labor and coordination are best designed and implemented follow the classical view closely. Implicit in all these approaches is the idea that design activities are prerogatives of top management which focus on the number of subunits, the links among them, and their internal characteristics; lower-management and nonmanagement personnel are not expected to participate in the process.1