PCANS Model of Structure in Organizations

This paper presents a network based approach to characterize organizational architectures in terms of three domain elements - individuals, tasks, and resources. Characterizing the possible relations among these elements results in five relational primitives - Precedence, Commitment of resources, Assignment of individuals to tasks, Networks (of relations among personnel) and Skills linking individuals to resources. It is demonstrated that the utility of this model for re-characterizing classical organizational theory and for generating a series of testable hypotheses about organizational performance.