When Do Organizations Need to Change (Part I)? Coping with Incongruence*

Abstract

Different organizational structures are better matched to certain mission types than others (organizational congruence). Consequently, one way to achieve superior mission effectiveness is to switch between organizational structures when circumstances dictate. However, little is known about the variables that signal the need for such structural adaptation. To explore this issue, we used a model-based design process to create mission scenarios that were either matched (congruent) or mismatched (incongruent) with two organizational structures (Functional, Divisional). Results indicated that, as predicted on the basis of the coordination requirements imposed by the model-based design process, performance in the incongruent cases was characterized by increased communication, increased perceived workload, and degraded performance. Given these overall results, we explored these data further by analyzing communication patterns to identify how the organizations attempted to cope with the congruence problem. Our results indicated that the communication strategies employed in the face of incongruence depended on organizational structure/mission scenario pairings, suggesting that the specific signals of the need for structural adaptation will likely depend on context.