Organizing for Competitiveness – Structural and Process Characteristics of Organizational Design

Abstract

Vizja Press&IT www.ce.vizja.pl 25An emerging multidimensional approach to organizational design outlines the need for the alignment of relevant structural and process characteristics of organizations. However, neither the interaction of these characteristics nor their role and importance for organizational competitiveness is properly examined in the literature. Therefore, the main goal of this paper is to investigate the relationship between the structural and process characteristics of organizational design to determine how and to what extent these characteristics contribute to achieving a competitive advantage. The field survey was conducted on a cross-sectional sample of 134 Croatian companies. The research findings outlined the need for a new organizational design approach that emphasizes both the vertical and horizontal dimensions of design solutions. This paper contributes to previous research by showing that organizational design represents a source of competitive advantage only if structural and process characteristics are commonly designed. In addition, we confirmed that although structural characteristics are usually more often addressed, it is process characteristics that make a difference. IntroductionOrganizational design has become an important and relevant topic both in theory and in practice. A turbulent and highly competitive business environment accompanied by a constant interplay of rising complexity and interdependence creates an ongoing demand for organizational designs that can respond to new and more powerful coordination mechanisms (Galbraith, 2012). Additionally, contemporary organizations must be efficient, effective, flexible, agile, innovative, fast-cycled, responsive, and aligned.They must focus on increasing the capacity of existing resources as an additional strategy for meeting the resource demands of the business (Steinmetz, Bennet, & Hakonsson, 2012). Although such organizational goals require very broad systemic efforts and call for numerous organizational interventions, differentiation and integration of activities can be recognized as one of the most relevant design issues (e.g., Dougherty, 2001;Lawrence & Lorsch, 1967;Raisch et al., 2009

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