Reframing Organizations. Lee G. Bolman
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2012, the BBC came under heavy fire when it broadcast a glowing tribute to a well‐known former BBC TV host, Jimmy Savile, but killed an investigative report detailing evidence that Savile had been a serial child molester.
Reorganizing, or restructuring, is a powerful but high‐risk tactic for improving organizations. Also in 2012, the BBC aired a report wrongly accusing a member of Margaret Thatcher's government of being a pedophile. Post‐mortem investigations attributed this error and the Savile one directly to the BBC's restructured, highly bureaucratized system. Major initiatives to redesign structure and processes often prove neither durable nor beneficial. Designing a structure, putting all the disparate parts in place, specifying their connections and satisfying every interested party's interests is difficult and risky. Although restructuring is one of the most popular management strategies for improving performance, and more than half of new CEOs implement a reorganization in their first two years on the job (Blenko, Mankins, and Rogers, 2010), Boston Consulting Group (2021) reports that “more than half of companies rate their reorganization initiatives as ‘mostly’ or ‘very’ unsuccessful.”
But it is also true that, over the past 100 years, management tools like strategic planning, decentralization, capital budgeting techniques, and self‐governing teams have done more than any other kind of innovation to allow companies to cross new performance thresholds (Hamel, 2006). As an example, American automakers scratched their heads for 20 years trying to figure out what made Toyota so successful. They tried all kinds of process innovations but finally reached the conclusion that Toyota had simply given their employees more authority to make decisions and solve problems (Hamel, 2006).
An organization's structure at any moment represents its unique resolution of an enduring set of basic tensions or dilemmas, which we discuss next. Then, drawing on the work of Henry Mintzberg and Sally Helgesen, we illustrate two views of options organizations may consider in aligning structure with mission and environment. We conclude with case examples illustrating both opportunities and challenges that managers encounter when attempting to create more workable and fruitful structural designs.
STRUCTURAL DILEMMAS
Finding an apt confluence of authority, roles, and relationships is a universal struggle. Managers rarely face well‐defined problems with clear‐cut solutions. Instead, they confront enduring structural dilemmas—tough trade‐offs without easy answers.
Differentiation Versus Integration
The tension between assigning work and synchronizing different efforts creates a classic dilemma. The more complex a role configuration (lots of people doing many different things), the harder it is to sustain a focused, tightly coupled enterprise. As size and complexity grow, organizations need more sophisticated—and more costly—coordination strategies. Lateral strategies are needed to supplement top‐down rules, policies, and commands.
Gap Versus Overlap
If key responsibilities are not clearly assigned, important tasks typically fall through the cracks. Conversely, roles and activities can overlap, creating conflict, wasted effort, and unintended redundancy. A patient in a prestigious teaching hospital, for example, called her husband and pleaded with him to rescue her. She couldn't sleep at night because hospital staff, especially nurses' aides and interns, kept waking her, often to repeat a procedure or administer a medication that someone else had done a short time before. Conversely, when she wanted something, pressing her nurses' call button rarely produced a timely response.
The new cabinet‐level Department of Homeland Security created in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks was intended to reduce gaps and overlaps among the many agencies responsible for responding to domestic threats. Activities incorporated into the new department included immigration, border protection, emergency management, and intelligence analysis. Yet the two most prominent antiterrorism agencies, the FBI and the CIA—with their long history of mutual gaps, overlaps, and bureaucratic squabbling—remained separate and outside the new agency (Firestone, 2002).
Underuse Versus Overload
If employees have too little work, they become bored and get in other people's way. Members of the clerical staff in a physician's office were able to complete most of their tasks during the morning. After lunch, they filled their time talking to family and friends. As a result, the office telephone lines were constantly busy, making it difficult for patients to ask questions and schedule appointments. Meanwhile, clients and routine paperwork swamped the nurses, who were often brusque and curt because they were so busy. Patients complained about impersonal care. Reassigning many of the nurses' clerical duties to office staff created a better structural balance.
Lack of Clarity Versus Lack of Creativity
If employees are unclear about what they are supposed to do, they often tailor their roles to fit personal preferences instead of shaping them to meet system‐wide goals. This frequently leads to trouble. Most McDonald's customers are not seeking novelty and surprise in their burgers and fries. But when responsibilities are over‐defined, people conform to prescribed roles and protocols in “bureaupathic” ways. They rigidly follow job descriptions, regardless of how much the service or product suffers.
“You lost my bag!” an angry passenger shouted, confronting an airline manager.
The manager responded, “How was the flight?”
“I asked about my bag,” said the passenger.
“That's not my job,” the manager replied. “Check with baggage claim.”
The passenger did not come away as a satisfied customer.
Excessive Autonomy Versus Excessive Interdependence
If the efforts of individuals or groups are too independent, people often feel isolated. Schoolteachers may feel lonely and unsupported because they work in self‐contained classrooms and rarely see other adults. Forced to make a sudden shift to online teaching during the Covid pandemic, many teachers felt even more alone and burdened. One study found that more than 70 percent contemplated leaving the profession (Zalaznik, 2021). Yet efforts to create closer teamwork have repeatedly run aground because of teachers' difficulties in working together. In contrast, if too tightly connected, people in roles and units are distracted and waste time on unnecessary coordination. IBM lost an early lead in the personal computer business in part because new initiatives required so many approvals—from levels and divisions alike—that new products were overdesigned and late to market. The same problem hindered Hewlett‐Packard's ability to innovate in the late 1990s.
Too Loose Versus Too Tight
Another critical structural dilemma is how to hold an organization together without holding it back. If structure is too loose, people go astray, with little sense of what others are doing. But rigid structures stifle flexibility and encourage people to waste time trying to bolster or beat the system.
We can see some of the perils of a loose structure in the former accounting firm Andersen Worldwide, indicted in 2002 for its role in the Enron scandal. Efforts to shred documents and alter memos at Andersen's Houston office went well beyond questionable accounting procedures. At its Chicago headquarters, Andersen had an internal audit team, the Professional Standards Group, charged with reviewing the work of regional offices. Unlike other large accounting firms, Andersen let frontline partners closest to the clients overrule the internal audit team. This fostered local discretion that was a selling point to customers, including Enron, but came back to haunt the firm. As a result of the lax controls, “the rainmakers were given the power to overrule the accounting nerds” (McNamee and Borrus, 2002, p. 33). The august firm collapsed as a result.
The opposite problem is common in managed health care. Insurance companies give clerks far from the patient's bedside the authority to approve or deny treatment or to review