Organization Change: Theory and Practice (Foundations for Organizational Science series) by W. Warner Burke

Author:W. Warner Burke
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781452257242
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Published: 2013-09-30T14:00:00+00:00

Figure 9.3 The Nadler-Tushman Congruence Model for Diagnosing Organizational Behavior

SOURCE: D. A. Nadler and M. L. Tushman, “A Diagnostic Model for Organization Behavior,” 1977, In Perspectives on Behavior in Organizations, edited by J. R. Hackman, E. E. Lawler III, and L. W. Porter, pp. 85–100, New York: McGraw-Hill. Reproduced by permission of the McGraw-Hill Companies.

Resources within the Nadler-Tushman model include capital (money, property, equipment, and so on), raw materials, technologies, people, and various intangibles, such as company name, logo, or brand, which may have a high value in the company’s market.

An organization’s history is also input to the system. The history determines, for example, patterns of employee behavior, policy, the types of people the organization attracts and recruits, and even how decisions are made in a crisis. Recall from Chapter 7 the example of two banks with highly similar backgrounds. When they merged after some 150 years of independence, their respective histories had shaped two entirely different corporate cultures. History is an important variable in the understanding of any organization.

Although strategy is categorized as an input in the model, Nadler and Tushman set it apart. Strategy is the process of determining how the organization’s resources are best used within the environment for optimal organizational functioning. It is the act of identifying opportunities in the environment and determining whether the organization’s resources are adequate for capitalizing on these opportunities. History plays a subtle but influential role in the strategic process.

Some organizations are very strategic; they plan, for example, the rational perspective regarding strategic change delineated by Rajagopalan and Spreitzer (1997; see Chapter 8). Other organizations simply react to changes in their environments or act opportunistically, rather than according to a long-range plan that determines which opportunities will be seized and which will be allowed to pass, similar to the learning perspective described by Rajagopalan and Spreitzer. As Nadler and Tushman (1977) pointed out, however, all organizations have strategies whether they are deliberate and formal or unintentional and informal. Rajagopalan and Spreitzer made the same point.

Outputs

Shifting to the right side of the model (Figure 9.3), we will consider outputs before covering the transformation process. Thus, we shall examine the organization’s environment from the standpoint of both how it influences the system and how it becomes influenced by the system’s outputs.

For diagnostic purposes, Nadler and Tushman (1977) presented four key categories of outputs: system functioning, group behavior, intergroup relations, and individual behavior and effect. With respect to the effectiveness of the system’s functioning as a whole, the following three questions should elicit the necessary information:

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