What are the ten basic principles of organisational design?

i. Complementarities…..How we go about restructuring needs to be compatible with what we are trying to achieve by the restructuring. The process of design must be complementary to the objectives.
ii. Minimal Critical Specification…..to build effective teams, specify no more than is absolutely necessary about the task or how jobs relate to the task, or how people relate to individual jobs. To build a high-performance team the rule is to FIX as little as possible.
iii. Variance Control……Support and reward groups that deal with errors at the point of origin. Effective teams need the legitimacy to find out where things go wrong and deal with a variance where it occurs in order to minimize exporting problems to others.
iv. Clear Goals and Flexible Strategies….Define what is expected in terms of performance early and clearly and then support adaptations toward appropriate means by which the group can achieve ends. To allow flexibility, do not over-specify.
v. Boundary Location and Control……Supervisors and managers have to grow to become more comfortable performing a role as a group resource, a beacon of coming changes, and a coordinator across task group boundaries. Boundaries interfere with the desirable sharing of knowledge and experience and so learning suffers.
vi. Information Flow…..Teams have to be deeply involved to determine what and where information is needed for self-direction. There needs to be a management commitment to provide information for task performance and learning. Information has to be provided where it is needed for self-direction, learning, and task improvement.
vii. Support Congruence…….Goals, reward, and support systems that integrate required behaviors have to be consistent. The reward and support systems have to be consistent with goals. Incentives have to be realigned to support team-based work structures. Individual-based compensation systems are being modified continually to support many different team structures. Skill-based schemes and gain sharing are foundations for high performance.
viii. Design and Human Values--Task and organization design has to be oriented toward improving both the technical and the human components of the organization. The process of design must address the need for variation and meaning in work. It has to take into account the needs for continuous learning, involvement in decision-making, help, and support between colleagues, and meaningful relationship between work and outside society, a desirable future.
ix. Incompletion---Design is a continuous commitment, a reiterative process. A design is a solution, which inevitably has to be changed, therefore it is critical to building learning and changeability into the team. Management has to appreciate that organization design toward high performance is a continuous process. What has to be learned is the process of design because it is a never-ending necessity.
x. Developing Organization Charts-Organization charts are graphical depictions of the official roles/positions in the organization and their relationship to each other, e.g., the top position and authority in the organization and then what other positions formally report to which other positions throughout the organization. Org charts are very common, especially in organizations with 5 or more people.

---

Chatelaine answered the question on June 16, 2021 at 06:42