Cultures and Organizations by Geert Hofstede & Gert Jan Hofstede & Michael Minkov

Author:Geert Hofstede & Gert Jan Hofstede & Michael Minkov
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
Published: 2010-03-15T04:00:00+00:00

Culture and Organizational Structure: Elaborating on Mintzberg

Henry Mintzberg, from Canada, is one of today’s leading authorities on organizational structure, at least in the English-speaking world. His chief merit has been to summarize the academic state of the art into a small number of concepts that are highly practical and easy to understand.

To Mintzberg, all good things in organizations come in fives.18 Organizations in general contain up to five distinct parts:

1. The operating core (the people who do the work)

2. The strategic apex (the top management)

3. The middle line (the hierarchy in between)

4. The technostructure (people in staff roles supplying ideas)

5. The support staff (people in staff roles supplying services)

Organizations in general use one or more of five mechanisms for coordinating activities:

1. Mutual adjustment (of people through informal communication)

2. Direct supervision (by a hierarchical superior)

3. Standardization of work processes (specifying the contents of work)

4. Standardization of outputs (specifying the desired results)

5. Standardization of skills (specifying the training required to perform the work)

Most organizations show one of five typical configurations:

1. The simple structure. Key part: the strategic apex. Coordinating mechanism: direct supervision.

2. The machine bureaucracy. Key part: the technostructure. Coordinating mechanism: standardization of work processes.

3. The professional bureaucracy. Key part: the operating core. Coordinating mechanism: standardization of skills.

4. The divisionalized form. Key part: the middle line. Coordinating mechanism: standardization of outputs.

5. The adhocracy. Key part: the support staff (sometimes with the operating core). Coordinating mechanism: mutual adjustment.

Mintzberg recognized the role of values in the choice of coordinating mechanisms. For example, about formalization of behavior within organizations (a part of the standardization of work processes), he wrote:

Organizations formalize behavior to reduce its variability, ultimately to predict and control it . . . to coordinate activities . . . to ensure the machinelike consistency that leads to efficient production . . . to ensure fairness to clients. . . . Organizations formalize behavior for other reasons as well, of more questionable validity. Formalization may, for example, reflect an arbitrary desire for order. . . . The highly formalized structure is above all the neat one; it warms the heart of people who like to see things orderly.19

Mintzberg’s reference to “questionable validity” obviously represents his own values choice. He did not go as far as recognizing the link between values and nationality. The IBM research has demonstrated to what extent values about the desirability of centralization (reflected in power distance) and formalization (reflected in uncertainty avoidance) affect the implicit models of organizations in people’s minds and to what extent these models differ from one country to another. This suggests that it should be possible to link Mintzberg’s typology of organizational configurations to national culture profiles based on the IBM data. The link means that, other factors being equal, people from a particular national background will prefer a particular configuration because it fits their implicit model and that otherwise similar organizations in different countries will resemble different Mintzberg configuration types because of different cultural preferences.

The link between Mintzberg’s five configurations and the quadrants of the power distance–uncertainty avoidance diagram is easy to make; it is presented in Figure 9.

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