Reframing Organizations. Lee G. Bolman
the shell, but also serves as captain. Coxswains vocally determine both the rate and degree of power of the oar strokes. They know their rowers physically and psychologically and how to inspire their best efforts. They also know opponents' strengths and weaknesses. Before a race, the coxswain develops a strategy but must be ready to alter it as a situation demands. A good coxswain is “a quarterback, a cheerleader, and a coach all in one. He or she is a deep thinker, canny like a fox, inspirational, and in many cases the toughest person in the boat” (Brown, 2014).
The importance of clear roles and coordination is further elaborated in the true story of America's first all‐black rowing team (Cooper, 2020). Against all odds, a group of young men transcended the destructive lures of a Chicago ghetto—drugs, gangs, and sex—to become a functioning racing crew competing against teams from elite white schools. Students at Manley Career Academy on Chicago's West Side were deeply skeptical about a sport that is typically the province of white, upper‐class, college males. Most had never been in a boat nor learned to swim. None were accustomed to the trappings of rowing sports: slick uniforms, ergs (exercise machines), or the confined space of the racing shell. As one potential recruit commented, “Even the boat they row is white; you ain't gonna get black people rowing down the lake like slaves.” But attracted by the lure of competition, travel, and pizza, young men signed up anyway and managed to overcome their deficits to meld into a well‐coordinated team and master the special skills of racing. Against all odds, they succeeded, both in racing and in transcending the constraints of poverty and race. Author Arshay Cooper credits rowing with changing his life: “The history we make today is simple; that we survived; I survived my past. In crew, you move ahead by looking in the opposite direction. I learned that it is okay to look back as you keep moving forward” (2020, p. 220).
In organizations large and small, structure is vital to success. Jeff Bezos, one of the world's most admired CEOs before he stepped down in July, 2021, is passionate about structure and process at the company he founded, Internet giant Amazon. He makes the company's strategy crystal clear. Embracing the familiar credo that the “customer is always right,” Bezos is riveted on delivering whatever the customer wants with speed and precision. His “culture of metrics” coddles Amazon's 250 million shoppers, not its more than half a million employees.
Amazon tracks its performance against some 500 measurable goals; almost 80 percent relate directly to customer service. Even the smallest delay in loading a Web page is carefully scrutinized, because Amazon has found that “a .01 second delay in page rendering can translate into a 1 percent drop in customer activity” (Anders, 2012). Supervisors measure and monitor employees' performance, observing behavior closely to see where steps or movements can be streamlined to improve efficiency.
Amazon is a classic example of a highly developed organizational structure—clear strategy, singular focus on the mission, well‐defined roles, and top‐down coordination. Some employees grumble about the working conditions and the fast pace, but many others find the tempo exhilarating. Bezos makes it clear: The customer is number one. Period. An empty chair in his office designated for the customer is a constant reminder of whom the company serves.
Effective as it is for Amazon, its structure is not right for everyone and not the only way to organize. W. L. Gore's lattice structure provides a holistic example. Gore's product spectrum includes waterproofing, guitar strings, wiring, and heart patches, among many others. Its structure has no ranks and few business cards with a leadership title. In the lattice structure, anyone can talk to anyone and no one tells others what to do. Leaders are those who can attract followers to pursue shared interests. Is the lattice structure working? Gore is one of America's largest privately owned companies with almost $4 billion in revenues in 2020.
The benefits of getting structure right are obvious under normal conditions and even more vital when existing organization architecture meets unexpected crises. Recall the horror of 9/11 and the breakdown in coordination between New York City's fire and police departments as they confronted the fiery challenges of terrorist strikes on the World Trade Center. That day saw countless inspiring examples of individual heroism and personal sacrifice. At the risk of their own lives, emergency personnel rescued thousands of people. Many died in the effort. But extraordinary individual efforts were hampered by breakdowns in communication, command, and control. Police helicopters near the North Tower radioed that it was near collapse more than 20 minutes before it fell. Police officers got the warning, and most escaped. But there was no link between fire and police radios, and the commanders in the two departments had command posts three blocks apart. It might not have helped even if they had talked, because the fire department's radios were notoriously unreliable in high‐rise buildings.
The breakdown of communication and coordination magnified the death toll—including 121 firefighters who died when the North Tower collapsed. The absence of a viable structure undermined the heroic efforts of highly dedicated, skilled professionals who gave their all in an unprecedented catastrophe (Dwyer, Flynn, and Fessenden, 2002).
The contrast between structures that work and those that don't highlights a core premise of the structural lens. The right mixture of strategy, roles, relationships, and coordination is essential to collective performance. This is true of all organizations: families, clubs, hospitals, military units, businesses, schools, churches, and public agencies. The right structure combats the risk that individuals, however talented, will become confused, ineffective, apathetic, or hostile. We saw earlier how confusion in Trump's White House undercut the noble efforts of some bright and capable individuals. The purpose of this chapter and the next two is to identify the basic ideas and inner workings of a perspective that is fundamental to collective human endeavors.
We begin our examination of the structural frame by highlighting its core assumptions, origins, and basic forms. The possibilities for designing an organization's social architecture are almost limitless, but any option must address three key questions: What is our overall strategy? How do we allocate responsibilities across different units and roles? And, once we've done that, how do we meld diverse efforts in pursuit of a common strategy? In this chapter, we explain these basic issues, describe the major options, and discuss imperatives to consider when designing a structure to fit the challenges of a unique situation.
STRUCTURAL ASSUMPTIONS
The central beliefs of the structural frame reflect confidence in rationality and faith that an appropriate array of roles and responsibilities will minimize distracting personal static and maximize people's focus on the job. The structural perspective advocates pointing people in the right direction, defining jobs, and stipulating how they work together. Properly designed, these provisions support and accommodate both collective goals and individual differences.
Six assumptions undergird the structural frame:
1 Organizations exist to achieve established goals and objectives and devise strategies to reach those goals.
2 Organizations increase efficiency and enhance performance through specialization and appropriate division of labor.
3 Suitable forms of coordination and control ensure that diverse efforts of individuals and units mesh.
4 Organizations work best when rationality prevails over personal agendas and extraneous pressures.
5 Effective structure fits an organization's current circumstances (including its strategy, technology, workforce, and environment).
6 When performance suffers from structural flaws, the preferred remedy is problem solving and restructuring.
Origins of the Structural Perspective
The structural view has two principal intellectual roots. The first is the work of industrial analysts bent on designing organizations for maximum efficiency. The most prominent of these, Frederick W. Taylor (1911), was the father of time‐and‐motion studies. He founded an approach that he labeled “scientific management.” Taylor broke tasks into minute parts and retrained workers to get the most from each motion and moment spent at work. Other theorists who contributed to the scientific management approach (Fayol, [1919] 1949; Gulick and Urwick, 1937; Urwick, 1937) developed