The four fundamental types of organizations, according to celebrated McGill University management professor Henry Mintzberg, are autocracy, bureaucracy, meritocracy and adhocracy. If that seems obscure, he more formally calls the organizational quartet the personal enterprise, the programmed machine, the professional assembly and the project pioneer.
You work in one – and each is quite different, with the organizational ethos and structure contributing to your successes and frustration.
In the personal enterprise, the focus is on the person in charge. The common examples would be a startup or a small business. But Prof. Mintzberg also points to a social enterprise run by its founder, a new government department, or a hospital in crisis. Someone is at the centre and everything revolves around that person.
America’s Cup yacht racing features this approach: Someone develops a vision, works with the designer of the hull, hires a crew, and is skipper or finds one. “It is not that the other members of the crew are incidental; it’s that their efforts revolve around the chief,” he writes in Understanding Organizations …Finally!
These organizations often resist structure, settling for a simplified form, and have a limited management hierarchy. In a small personal enterprise, everyone would probably report to the founder. “No structure can be more dynamic, more engaging, more vibrant than one led by a founder with a vision,” Prof. Mintzberg stresses.
But with that can come the drawbacks: Founders get so enmeshed in the details they lose sight of the big picture or get so enamoured with the great vision that they lose sight of the details necessary to sustain it. And in these autocracies, if the leader gets sick or loses interest, everything can crumble.
If that’s the simplest structure, the most elaborate – but not, Prof. Mintzberg observes, the most complex – is the programmed machine, a conventional hierarchical organization. “Programmed machines love hierarchy, order, control, systems and especially rules, rules, rules. Everything conceivable is programmed, sometimes even the customers,” he writes, pointing to when we clear our trays at a fast-food franchise.
In the operating core of this machine, jobs are made as simple, specialized and repetitive as possible, requiring a minimum of training. Football is a programmed machine with a host of rules and, on the field, the quarterback, atop the hierarchy, calling the plays, by number of course, and everyone sets out on prescribed tasks.
“When an integrated set of simple tasks must be performed precisely, predictably and consistently, at least by animate human beings rather than inanimate machines, the programmed machine is unbeatable. And, for the same reason, unbearable, too,” Prof. Mintzberg says. It’s bureaucracy.
In the professional assembly, people come together less closely than in other organizations. Think of schools, universities, hospitals, orchestras and baseball. “It may look like they are working together, but mostly they are working apart, co-ordinated almost automatically by the standardization of their skills, based on their extensive training,” he explains.
As they collaborate, often nobody is in charge but they work effectively because there are standards each follows, imported from outside the organization. They have been educated in those skills and standards before joining the organization and undergo extensive on-the-job training.
Usually the structure is based on a set of relatively autonomous professionals, effectively an upside-down pyramid with the professionals on top and the administration below. “So while the machine organization defers to the authority of office, the professional organization defers to the autonomy of expertise. These are meritocracies,” Prof. Mintzberg writes.
None of those structures, he notes, are capable of sophisticated innovation, such as that of a high-tech research lab, an avant garde film company, or a factory making complex prototypes, where projects tend to be the key organizing factor.
He labels what has evolved to respond to that situation “project pioneers,” signifying they are the explorers of the modern world, staffed by intrapreneurial experts who collaborate to create novel inputs. It resembles hockey, where each time a team gets the puck it’s like a new project and opportunity, as they head toward their opponent’s goal, the strengths and weaknesses of players on both sides a huge factor. It’s adhocracy.
There are permanent adhocracies that reorganize from project to project and temporary adhocracies that come together for one project and disband, as with the Olympics. “The project pioneer is no utopia,” Prof. Mintzberg says. “In particular, the ambiguities of the project organization can be unnerving.”
Those are fundamental forms but not the only. A divisional structure, for example, can be an important feature of many organizations.
When Prof. Mintzberg’s students have studied organizations – or he asks managers in workshops or classes where their organization fits – about half tend to be hybrids, which he says is fine, although he recommends limiting the number of lumps of sugar you put in your organizational tea. In each form, conflict can pull people apart, culture pull them together, and the division of labour push colleagues away.
But if you manage, it helps to use his classification. You will be more effective when you understand and accept that your organization is an autocracy, bureaucracy, meritocracy or adhocracy.
Cannonballs
- With whom will you have lunch this year? Consultant Donald Cooper asks you to imagine what you could learn and accomplish if just once or twice a week you chose to have lunch with someone special – someone who doesn’t normally have access to you, from employees to important customers to key suppliers.
- A new study shows value in having an older work force. Statistically separating the correlated factors of age and tenure, it found that age has no statistical effect on performance but tenure does: Well-managed tenure can return greater-than-average value to the employer. As well, it found the tenure of leaders and managers also positively affected the financial performance of the units they lead.
- “Women buy E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G,” declares management guru Tom Peters with typical bombast, “and marketers (still) don’t get it.”
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.