Organisational Structures
The study of organizations includes a focus on optimizing organizational structure. According to management science, most human organizations fall roughly into four types:
- Pyramids or hierarchies
- Committees or juries
- Matrix organizations
- Ecologies
A hierarchy exemplifies an arrangement with a leader who leads other individual members of the organization. This arrangement is often associated with bureaucracy.
These structures are formed on the basis that there are enough people under the leader to give him support. Just as one would imagine a real pyramid, if there are not enough stone blocks to hold up the higher ones, gravity would irrevocably bring down the monumental structure. So one can imagine that if the leader does not have the support of his subordinates, the entire structure will collapse. Hierarchies were satirized in The Peter Principle (1969), a book that introduced hierarchiology and the saying that "in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence."
Read more about this topic: Organization
Famous quotes containing the word structures:
“The American who has been confined, in his own country, to the sight of buildings designed after foreign models, is surprised on entering York Minster or St. Peter’s at Rome, by the feeling that these structures are imitations also,—faint copies of an invisible archetype.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)