Has organizational culture now replaced organizational structure as the dominant method of management control in organizations?
As we can see, in the last 20 years, the type of applicable management over organizational structure is changing due to many factors like the turbulent business and political environments, in order to keep an organization successful and so its goals can be met. Many organizations that started growing wanted and needed that recipe of success that until now few big successful organizations had. Management theory until now thought that power is ascribed to positions rather than to the individuals holding those positions (Weber’s idea of bureaucracy). It was also taken into account the idea of Taylor about scientific management or better ‘the one best way’ to accomplish a task using scientifically-determined studies of time and motion. Also influential was the idea of Fayol of invoking units within the chain of command, authority, discipline, task specialization and other aspects of organizational power and job separation.
Those ideas created the context for vertically-structured organizations characterized by distinct job classification and top-down authority structures, or what became known as the classical organizational structure. A hierarchical reporting structure, job specialization and the relation between individual interests and goals of the organization combined to give result in the organizations arranged by functional departments and maintained by rules, regulations and operating procedures. This bureaucratic structure of organizations was the prototype while small organizations started growing. And for what reasons? The main concepts for one structure to succeed were: shared reliability, flat hierarchy, decentralized reporting, high transparency and rapid response to any change.
But what about organizational culture???
Organizations are to some degree a function of their contexts and there is a strong relation...