When Do Organizations Need to Change (Part II)? Incongruence in Action*

Abstract

Organizations that adapt to changes in their environment have a much better chance at achieving their mission and performing well. When organizations do adapt they usually alter their strategies, but rarely do they change their organizational structure even when that structure no longer fits the mission. To identify the conditions that will be salient enough to cause organizations to alter not only their strategies, but also their current structures, 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). We then examined measures over time to identify ones that discriminated between congruent and incongruent conditions early in the mission scenarios. Several measures of communications, performance and workload appeared