Abstract

Organization design is part of every manager and leader’s job: attempting to understand and improve how organizations function through creating or adjusting of roles, processes, and structures. In fact, most managers are faced with organization design challenges on an almost daily basis.

Managers constantly design and redesign individual roles, define new projects (including their structure and reporting relationships), and contemplate better ways to co-ordinate organizational processes with multiple internal stakeholders.  Periodically they may also make more fundamental changes to business structures, or adapt and implement high-level designs developed by others.

This textbook introduces concepts and frameworks for designing complex organizations. It starts by outlining some of the key concepts that serve as a foundation to understanding how the theory applies in practice. It also reviews the status of organisation design - as a field of research and as a practical discipline - both its achievements, and some of its challenges and limitations. It then discusses how the field can develop to ensure that it provides research-based and useful knowledge that contributes to enhancing the effectiveness of organizations.

“Nicolay Worren provides a much needed blend of organization design theory and practice as well as a rigorous approach to simplifying today’s complex global enterprises. It is an essential read for any organizational designer”

Marc Gerstein, past president of the Organization Design Forum and author of Organizational Architecture and Flirting with Disaster

“…The message that organization design is a part of every managers’ job, is a major determinant of effectiveness, but requires considerable skill, comes through load and clear from this book.  With its use of challenges, key questions and proposed approaches the book explains complex concepts and provides a good blend academic insight and practical relevance”.

Paul R. Sparrow, Director, Centre for Performance-led HR, Lancaster University Management School

“In training the future leaders of the corporate world, business schools have historically placed little emphasis on organization design. Nicolay Worren’s book on organization design demonstrates this is a huge mistake. How we design our corporations has an enormous impact on their performance! Worren develops a novel, complexity-oriented approach by advocating a ‘design’ rather than ‘decision-making’ attitude. Worren’s book draws on organizational architecture as a key notion and also provides a clear, step-by-step process toward applying core ideas in organizational design and architecture. A must-read for today’s (aspiring) managers.”

Georges Romme, Dean of Industrial Engineering & Innovation Sciences, Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands

“This clearly written book offers a contemporary and thoughtful presentation of the architectural options involved in organisational design. It candidly acknowledges the neglect of organisational design in much research (…). It emphasizes that the topic of organisational design must include processes of design (…) Overall, Nicolay Worren persuasively makes the argument that organizational design deserves to be a core topic in the modern business school.

Lex Donaldson, Professor of Management in Organisational Design, Australian School of Business, University of New South Wales