The Process Approach to Organizational Design

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Mackenzie, Kenneth D.

Affiliations: School of Business, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas 66045, USA

Abstract: Organizations should be viewed less as static entities and more as a set of processes to become something else. The process approach for designing organizations to become more productive, adaptable and efficiently adaptable focusses on these many processes in order to derive the Organizational Architecture. The process approach emphasizes how things occur and avoids teleological reasoning whenever possible. A process is a time dependent sequence of elements governed by a rule called a process law. Because organizations engage in a wide variety of processes, understanding what these processes are and how they combine allows an analyst to better understand how the organization operates. This paper provides a tutorial on process thinking which is illustrated by the research of the author and his colleagues. It also introduces the concept of combined congruency and explains how to use this concept in the Organizational Audit and Analysis technology for organizational design.

Keywords: Congruency, Interdependence, Organizational design, Process, Process law, Strong inference, Structure, Task Processes

DOI: 10.3233/HSM-1989-8105

Journal: Human Systems Management, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 31-43, 1989