Fundamentals of Management, 8th ed

Chapter 6: Organization Structure and Design

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EMERGING ISSUES IN ORGANIZATION DESIGN

In today’s complex and ever-changing environment, it should come as no surprise that

managers continue to explore and experiment with new forms of organization design.

Many organizations are creating designs for themselves that maximize their ability to

adapt to changing circumstances and to a changing environment. They try to accomplish

this by not becoming too compartmentalized or too rigid. As we noted earlier, bureau-

cratic organizations are hard to change, slow, and inflexible. To avoid these problems,

then, organizations can try to be as different from bureaucracies as possible—relatively

few rules, general job descriptions, and so forth. This final section highlights some of

the most important emerging issues.

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