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Rosabeth Moss Kanter
In her 2004 interview "Changing Organizational Structures," Harvard Business School Professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter discusses her view of the relationship between organizational structures and human behavior in terms of how productivity can be improved when the human nature of employees is fully acknowledged by corporations. Moss Kanter sees corporate organization as something that can negatively impact the very human desires of employees: as she notes, "innovation is a central activity that needs to be encouraged everywhere, to fulfill the human drive for improvement and to solve problems that limit opportunity" (Puffer 2004, 101). However it is possible that Moss Kanter is far too generous in her assessment of the "human drive for improvement." A glance at some specific organizational designs may in fact suggest that "less is more" might be a better approach, especially in the salutarily oligarchical business climate of the early 21st century.
Moss Kanter notes that "widespread use of the term 'human resources' did not occur until the early 1980s" suggesting that the term itself is part of a particular historical moment. She also suggests earlier in the interview that the historical moment followed upon the productivity crisis of the 1970s, with the belief on the part...
Moss Kanter sees this as a top-down effect, whereby the homogenized class of white men in managerial positions were neither representative nor sensitive to the integration of women and minorities into the workplace. To a certain extent, all of Moss Kanter's prescriptions have been implemented as a matter of common sense: to use a salient example from the 21st century, although Google employs a standard hierarchical business structure, their institutional ethos deliberately offers flexibility to employees in developing their own creative initiatives without nagging supervision, with Google's famous "70/20/10" rule of what percentage of employee time should be devoted to assigned tasks, new projects, and irrelevant parerga (Manimala and Wasdani, 2013).
Yet we might question the wisdom of permitting nearly a third of employees' time to be devoted to self-generated new ideas when a corporation is not Google, and in a position to recruit employees most likely to come up with valuable ideas. A corporation built on standardization and franchising like McDonald's would be frankly destroyed if employees were given Google-style…
Moss Kanter notes that "widespread use of the term 'human resources' did not occur until the early 1980s" suggesting that the term itself is part of a particular historical moment. She also suggests earlier in the interview that the historical moment followed upon the productivity crisis of the 1970s, with the belief on the part of some (including herself) that the "structure of the old industrial bureaucracy might just be a cause of the failure to reach full potential in terms of productivity" (97-8). Moss Kanter sees this as a top-down effect, whereby the homogenized class of white men in managerial positions were neither representative nor sensitive to the integration of women and minorities into the workplace. To a certain extent, all of Moss Kanter's prescriptions have been implemented as a matter of common sense: to use a salient example from the 21st century, although Google employs a standard hierarchical business structure, their institutional ethos deliberately offers flexibility to employees in developing their own creative initiatives without nagging supervision, with Google's famous "70/20/10" rule of what percentage of employee time should be devoted to assigned tasks, new projects, and irrelevant parerga (Manimala and Wasdani, 2013).
Yet we might question the wisdom of permitting nearly a third of employees' time to be devoted to self-generated new ideas when a corporation is not Google, and in a position to recruit employees most likely to come up with valuable ideas. A corporation built on standardization and franchising like McDonald's would be frankly destroyed if employees were given Google-style leeway. The biggest difference between the two is, of course, location: a McDonald's franchise has to be fixed in place to serve a local community, whereas a corporation like Google is only located in northern California for convenience and real estate values. For the services Google provides, the entire corporate structure could be picked up and moved elsewhere at any time with no real damage done to the product -- the only risk would be a public relations backlash, and the possible unwillingness of its most desirable employees to be located in Bangladesh rather than Mountain View. Business culture may have reached a point where, contrary to Moss Kanter's assessment, the desirability of working for Google might trump other desirable employee perks like not living in the third world.
This tension will only grow with the expansion of the silicon-based economy in the 21st century: perhaps the most significant organizational clue would come from PayPal and its visionary founding CEO Peter Thiel. Thiel understood the transnational (indeed revolutionary) nature of PayPal before selling it to eBay in
Org Structure An organization's structure affects many aspects of the organization. Kanter (1999) notes that people within an organization tend to operate in line with the messages that they are receiving, so structural elements do affect culture and vice versa. An organizational structure reflects how the people at the top of the organization view how the organization works. So if you have, for example, few new products, you might just work
Organizational Structures / Organizational Structures and Its Behavioral Implication Behavorial Implications of Distinct Organisational Designs Structure Better Than Others The organizational design process helps in managing and altering the official system of power and task relationships which governs the way people in the organization must make use of organizational resources and cooperate with one another for accomplishing company goals. Light on Problem Business Administration Professor, Rosabeth Moss Kanter of Harvard Business School, dealt with the
Organizational Change and Management Organizations have set goals and objectives that should be achieved within a specified period. For organizations to achieve them, they should have structures that would ensure that the needed activities are done in the desired way. Maguire (2012) defines the organizational structure as the way in which people are grouped to get work done in a firm. It forms the basis for the development of an effective