Understanding Organizational Cultures and Structures

Adhocracy culture

Creates an environment of innovating, visioning the future, accepting of managing change, and risk taking, rule-breaking, experimentation, entrepreneurship, and uncertainty.

Clan culture

Focuses on relationships, team building, commitment, empowering human development, engagement, mentoring, and coaching.

Competing Values Framework

Developed by Kim Cameron and Robert Quinn this model is used for diagnosing an organization's cultural effectiveness and examining its fit with its environment.

Complex-Stable environments

Environments that have a large number of external elements, and elements are dissimilar and where elements remain the same or change slowly.

Complex-Unstable environments

Environments that have a large number of external elements, and elements are dissimilar and where elements change frequently and unpredictably.

Corporate culture

Defines how motivating employees' beliefs, behaviors, relationships, and ways they work creates a culture that is based on the values the organization believes in.

Divisional structure

An organizational structure characterized by functional departments grouped under a division head.

Domain

The purpose of the organization from which its strategies, organizational capabilities, resources, and management systems are mobilized to support the enterprise's purpose.

Functional structure

The earliest and most used organizational designs.

Geographic structure

An Organizational option aimed at moving from a mechanistic to more organic design to serve customers faster and with relevant products and services; as such, this structure is organized by locations of customers that a company serves.

Government and political environment forces

The global economy and changing political actions increase uncertainty for businesses, while creating opportunities for some industries and instability in others.

Hierarchy culture

Emphasizes efficiency, process and cost control, organizational improvement, technical expertise, precision, problem solving, elimination of errors, logical, cautious and conservative, management and operational analysis, careful decision making.

Horizontal organizational structures

A "flatter" organizational structure often found in matrix organizations where individuals relish the breath and development that their team offers.

Internal dimensions of organizations

How an organization's culture affects and influences its strategy.

Market culture

Focuses on delivering value, competing, delivering shareholder value, goal achievement, driving and delivering results, speedy decisions, hard driving through barriers, directive, commanding, competing and getting things done.

Matrix structure

An organizational structure close in approach to organic systems that attempt to respond to environmental uncertainty, complexity, and instability.

McKinsey 7-S model

A popular depiction of internal organizational dimensions.

Mechanistic organizational structures

Best suited for environments that range from stable and simple to low-moderate uncertainty and have a formal "pyramid' structure.

Natural disaster and human induced environmental problems

Events such as high-impact hurricanes, extreme temperatures and the rise in CO2 emissions as well as 'man-made' environmental disasters such as water and food crises; biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse; large-scale involuntary migration are a force that affects organizations.

Networked-team structure

A form of the horizontal organization.

Organic organizational structures

The opposite of a functional organizational form that works best in unstable, complex changing environments.