On the relationship between organizational complexity and organizational structuration

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Moldoveanu, MC; Bauer, RM
• 署名单位: University of Toronto; Johannes Kepler University Linz
• 刊物名称: ORGANIZATION SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1047-7039
• DOI: 10.1287/orsc.1030.0058
• 发表日期: 2004
• 页码: 98-118
• 关键词: ORGANIZATIONAL COMPLEXITY; STRUCTURATION; complexity-coping strategies; organizational production functions

摘要

This article represents a contribution to the conceptualization of organizational complexity. The first part of the article relates the concept of complexity to the production tasks of the organization by deriving measures of the complexity of production and planning tasks within the organization. This move allows us to analyze organizational activities in terms of the computational complexity of the tasks that the organization carries out. Drawing on concepts from theoretical computer science, the article introduces a taxonomy of production tasks based on their computational complexity and shows how to use the notion of computational complexity to analyze organizational phenomena such as vertical integration disintegration, the choice between markets and organizations as performers of particular production tasks, and the internal partitioning of organizational tasks and activities. The article then relates the complexity of the production function of the organization to the ways in which organizations structure themselves. It attempts to bring theorizing about organizational behavior based on complexity theory closer to the conceptual realm of mainstream organization theory and to make the concepts of complexity theory more useful to empirical examinations of firm dynamics and organizational behavior.