The Contingency Theory of Organizations

Purchasing Organization and Design: A Literature Review

“…(2) Effectiveness measures the degree to which organizational goals are reached and is achieved by fitting characteristics of the organization to its context (Lawrence and Lorsch 1967;Child 1975;Donaldson 2001: 1) (3) Adaptiveness refers to the ability of an organization to react to changes in its environment. For the sake of brevity, we exclude measures a company may take to influence the environment from the analysis, although it is clear that the 'strategic choice' typically includes more than the definition of structural forms (Child 1972).…”

Exploring Congruence Between Organizational Structure and Task Performance: A Simulation Approach

“…Our interest in drawing on research in human organizations is twofold: first we look to draw on general organizational principles that may apply to artificial as well as human organizations; second, we are ultimately interested in being able to build hybrid humanagent networks, and so staying within the bounds of organizational properties that have some analogue in human behavior seems desirable. In human settings, organizational performance has been demonstrated empirically to be associated with the degree of congruence (or 'fit') between organizational structure and properties of the task or environment [9]. Accordingly, it is to an organizations advantage to monitor the fit between its structure and mission, and to alter its structure when a misfit is identified.…”

User co-production of public service delivery: Effects on trust

“…A logical starting-point is contingency theory, which primarily deals with external factors ('contingencies') that moderate the effect of specific organizational characteristics on organizational effectiveness (Donaldson, 2001). Uncertainty is regarded as one of the most important contingencies organizations are faced with.…”