Readings week 5
Paper 1: Organizational strategy, structure, and process -Miles, R.E., C.C. Snow, A.D. Meyer
and H.J. Coleman Jr. (1978)
Paper 2: Organizational transformation as punctuated equilibrium: An empirical test -
Romanelli, E. and M.L. Tushman (1994)
Paper 3: An ambidexterity perspective toward multinational enterprises from emerging
economies - Luo, Y., & Rui, H. (2009)
Seminar notes week 5
1
,Readings week 5
Paper 1 - Organizational strategy, structure, and
process
Miles, R.E., C.C. Snow, A.D. Meyer and H.J. Coleman Jr. (1978)
● Organisations are an articulate purpose and an established mechanism for achieving it
(the purpose)
● Most organisations:
○ Engage in an ongoing process of evaluating their purposes - questioning,
verifying, and redefining the manner of interaction with their environments
○ Modify and refine the mechanism by which they achieve their
purposes-rearranging their structure of roles and relationships and their
managerial processes
● Effective organisations:
○ Carve out and maintain a viable market for their goods or services
○ Establish mechanisms that complement their market strategy
● Ineffective organisations:
○ Fail the market-alignment task
○ Struggle with these structural and process mechanisms
● The dynamic process of adjusting to environmental change and uncertainty (of
maintaining an effective alignment with the environment while managing internal
interdependencies) is complex: many decisions and behaviours at several organisation
levels.
○ This can be helped by searching for patterns in the behaviour of organisations
Aim of this article: theoretical framework that can be used to analyse an organisation as an
integrated and dynamic whole; this takes into account the interrelationships among strategy,
structure and process. Elements:
● A general model of the process of adaptation which specifies the major decisions
needed by the organisation to maintain an effective alignment with “its environment
● An organisational typology which portrays different patterns of adaptive behaviour
used by organisations within a given industry or another grouping
Organisations:
● Limited in their choice of adaptive behaviours -> use those that top management
believes will allow the effective direction and control of human resources
Understanding how the adaptive process works, how organisations move through it, what are
the managerial requirements of different adjustment patterns -> help achieve an effective
organisation-environment equilibrium
The adaptive cycle
= a general model of the adaptive process -> consistent with the strategic-choice approach to
the study of organisations
Proponents of the strategic-choice perspective:
● Organisational behaviour is only partially determined by environmental conditions
2
, Readings week 5
● The choices (numerous and complex) which top managers make are the critical
determinants of organisational structure and process. These can be seen as three
broad problems of organisational adaptation:
○ The entrepreneurial problem
○ The engineering problem
○ The administrative problem
The entrepreneurial problem
● In new or rapidly growing organisations, or those who have survived a major crisis, an
entrepreneurial insight must be developed into a concrete:
○ Definition of an organisational domain
○ A specific good or service
○ A target market
○ A market segment
● In ongoing organisations, who already have a set of solutions to their engineering and
administrative problems, it might be more difficult to find a solution to the
entrepreneurial problem.
● Solutions:
○ Marked by management’s acceptance of a particular product-market domain
○ Commit resources to achieve objectives relative to the domain
○ External and internal commitment is needed
● Responsibility:
○ Top-management: overall
○ Lower managerial levels: identification of a new opportunity and the initial
impetus for movement towards it might happen here
The engineering problem
● Involves the creation of a system which operationalises management’s solution to the
entrepreneurial problem.
● Requirements:
○ Select an appropriate technology (input-transformation-output process) for
producing and distributing chosen products or services
○ Form new information, communication and control linkages
● Once solutions are reached -> initial implementation of the administrative systems take
place
● No assurance the organisation’s configuration will stay the same -> the final form will
be determined during the administrative phase
The administrative problem
● Reducing uncertainty within the organisational system
● Rationalising and stabilising those activities which successfully solved problems faced
by the organisation during the entrepreneurial and engineering phases
○ Rationalise the systems already developed (uncertainty reduction)
○ Formulate and implement those processes which enable the organisation to
continue to evolve (innovation)
3
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