PSY 6300 Module 4 Designing an Organizational Structure Paper: Differentiation, Integration and Mintzberg's Configurations Example

Too Big for the Kitchen Table: Redesigning a Growing Food Bank's Structure

Student Name

Graduate Studies, Thomas Edison State University

PSY-6300: Organizational Theory

Mentor Name

Month Day, Year

Too Big for the Kitchen Table: Redesigning a Growing Food Bank's Structure

Introduction

Our food bank began twenty years ago with a few volunteers working around a kitchen table. Today it has 48 staff, hundreds of volunteers, a warehouse, a fleet, a nutrition education program and a client services team. In the past three years, as we doubled in size, decisions slowed because everything still went to the executive director, while warehouse, programs and development staff rarely coordinated. This paper uses organizational theory to propose a new structure.

Elements of Structure

Organizational structure defines how work is divided, grouped and coordinated. Key dimensions include specialization, how narrowly jobs are defined; formalization, how much is governed by written rules; centralization, where decisions are made; and departmentalization, how units are grouped, by function, product, geography or customer. Coordination can occur through direct supervision, standardized processes, standardized outputs, standardized skills or mutual adjustment among workers.

Mechanistic and Organic Structures

Burns and Stalker (1961) studied firms in Scotland and England adapting to the new electronics industry. Firms in stable environments often succeeded with mechanistic structures: specialized roles, clear hierarchy, vertical communication and detailed rules. Firms facing rapid technological and market change needed organic structures: flexible roles, lateral communication, shared knowledge and authority based on expertise rather than position. Firms that kept mechanistic structures in changing environments struggled to adapt.

Differentiation and Integration

Lawrence and Lorsch (1967) studied firms in the plastics industry, among others. They found that departments dealing with separate segments of the environment, such as research, production and sales, developed different goals, time horizons and styles, which they called differentiation. Effective firms were highly differentiated where their environments demanded it but also achieved strong integration, coordination among departments, through mechanisms such as integrating roles, cross-functional teams and open conflict resolution. Their findings helped establish contingency theory: there is no one best structure; the right structure depends on the environment.

Mintzberg's Configurations

Mintzberg (1980) synthesized research on structure into five configurations. The simple structure, coordinated by direct supervision from a strategic apex, suits small, young organizations. Large, stable operations fit the machine bureaucracy, which relies on standardizing the work itself. The professional bureaucracy, coordinated by standardized skills, suits organizations of trained professionals. The divisionalized form, coordinated by standardized outputs, suits organizations serving distinct markets. The adhocracy, coordinated by mutual adjustment, suits complex, innovative work. Each configuration emphasizes a different part of the organization, such as the strategic apex, the technostructure or the operating core.

Diagnosing the Food Bank

Using Mintzberg's terms, we are still run as a simple structure, with the executive director coordinating everything directly, which suited us when small but now creates a bottleneck. Our warehouse and delivery operations face a stable, routine task suited to a machine bureaucracy with standard procedures. Our nutrition and client services programs face changing community needs suited to more organic, flexible work. As Lawrence and Lorsch would predict, these units have become differentiated, but we lack mechanisms to integrate them.

A Proposed Structure

I proposed three changes. First, delegate operational decisions to directors of operations, programs and development, freeing the executive director for strategy and external relations. Second, standardize warehouse and delivery procedures, with written processes for intake, storage and routes, appropriate to the routine work. Third, create integrating mechanisms: a weekly cross-functional coordination meeting and an integrator role, a programs and operations liaison, responsible for aligning distribution with program needs, such as ensuring fresh produce reaches nutrition classes.

Centralization and Decision Rights

Our biggest structural problem is centralization. Small decisions, such as approving a second delivery to a pantry that ran short or buying a replacement pallet jack, wait for the executive director, who is often at meetings with funders. A decision rights chart would list common decisions and who makes them: directors approve spending within their budgets and schedule changes in their areas, while the executive director keeps hiring of directors, major contracts and public commitments. Writing these rights down removes guesswork and speeds routine work.

Programs as an Adhocracy

Our nutrition and client services staff design cooking classes, mobile pantries and school backpack programs that change with community needs and grant opportunities. This work fits Mintzberg's adhocracy better than a bureaucracy: small teams form around projects, draw on staff with different skills and dissolve when the project ends. Imposing warehouse-style rules on programs would slow them down, just as Burns and Stalker would predict for organic work forced into mechanistic structures.

Judging the New Structure

To know whether the redesign works, I proposed tracking the time from request to decision for common approvals, partner complaints about coordination, staff survey items on clarity of roles and the number of issues escalated to the executive director each month. Measuring these before and after the change will show whether the structure has removed the bottleneck.

Managing the Transition

Staff accustomed to bringing everything to the executive director may be uncomfortable with new authority, and some may fear losing access. Clear decision rights, training for new directors and regular review of the structure will help.

Directors will also need time with each other, since they now share decisions the executive director once made alone, and a monthly directors' meeting gives them a place to settle disagreements before they reach staff.

Limits

Burns and Stalker and Lawrence and Lorsch studied manufacturing firms decades ago. Real organizations combine features of several configurations. The food bank is invented.

Conclusion

Burns and Stalker showed that structure should fit the stability of the environment, Lawrence and Lorsch showed that effective organizations differentiate where needed and integrate strongly and Mintzberg showed how different configurations coordinate work. Delegating authority, standardizing routine operations and adding integrating roles can help a food bank that has outgrown its kitchen table structure work as one organization.

References

Burns, T., & Stalker, G. M. (1961). The management of innovation. Tavistock.

Lawrence, P. R., & Lorsch, J. W. (1967). Differentiation and integration in complex organizations. Administrative Science Quarterly, 12(1), 1-47. https://doi.org/10.2307/2391211

Mintzberg, H. (1980). Structure in 5's: A synthesis of the research on organization design. Management Science, 26(3), 322-341. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.26.3.322