Four Perspectives on Organizations

Four Perspectives on Organizations

This note describes four images or metaphors on organizations that furnish distinctive lens or paradigms for thinking about behavior in organizations, understandings its causes, and developing programs for change. Note that each image or metaphor draws attention to a limited set of organizational properties and characteristics as critical for understanding, but pays scant attention to a host of other aspects that fall outside its purview. Thus, they concentrate attention and interest, but in a highly simplistic ways that obscures the richness of organizational phenomena. Presumably, managers equipped with the ability to view organizations through diverse lens will achieve greater understanding.

A. Organizations as Machines

This was the first image to dominate management thought about the nature of organizations. The Industrial Revolution brought with it the growth of large-scale organizations and the need to develop ways of managing them. Prior to this time, organizations were smaller, their owners typically managed them, and the relatively few employees could be supervised directly by the owner. The evolution of factory technologies coupled with the growth of efficient capital markets enabled small organizations to grow in the latter part of the 1800s. In the process, the number of owners often increased and most were passive shareholders with no active management role. At the same time, extensive immigration in the latter part of the 19th century provided firms with large pools of cheap labor to run the new machinery and the number of employees often grew rapidly. These changes led to increasing demand for "professional" managers capable of organizing and controlling the workforce for the mass production of rather simple goods to serve the interests of the absentee owners.

Armies, churches, and governments furnished early management theorists in the U.S. with their only models of what efficient large-scale organizations might look like. In each case, the highly bureaucratic structures suggested that factories engaged in mass production should be designed as a highly specialized machine that could maximize efficiency. Efforts to design organizations as machines proved extremely successful and clearly play a role in the emerging dominance of the U.S. economy in the 20th century.

This design model focuses on several organizational properties:

1. Mission, goals, strategies, planning, and control. If we take seriously the notion that it helps to think of organizations as machines, the first question that comes up has to do with the purpose of the machine since different machines are needed for different purposes.