Organizational Design and Management

Welcome

The Organizational Design and Management Program is an initiative of the GL&B Institute for Management Training and Studies.  The Institute engages in and promotes training and research on matters relating to organizational design and management, comparative management studies, management of emerging companies, management in developing countries, global law and business strategies and country and regional management studies.  The Institute houses and supports several research centers and programs that undertake activities in these areas.  Click here for further information on the Institute.

Leadership Styles and Practices

Leadership styles and practices are extremely important inputs into the performance and satisfaction of any organization’s human resources and there are a number of alternative theories regarding the driving forces behind leadership and the strategies that leaders should adopt in order to be effective.  A non-exhaustive list of examples would include trait theories, which are based on the belief that leadership is based on individual attributes or traits; situational and contingency theories, promoted by Fiedler (Fiedler Contingency Model), Vroom (Vroom-Yetton Decision Model), House (Path-Goal Theory) and Hersey and Blanchard (Situational Leadership Model); and transactional and transformational theories, explained by Burns and Bass among others.  This report provides a brief introduction to the complex topic of leadership styles and practices including discussions of how leadership roles and activities vary at each level of the organizational hierarchy; the core roles and activities of all leaders, regardless of their level; and “leadership styles”.

Strategic Alliances: Governance & Dispute Resolution Mechanisms

Strategic alliances, being creatures of contract as opposed to formal legal entities with their prescribed rules and requirements with respect to governance and termination, provide significant potential for opportunism and risks that one or both of the parties may appropriate the fruits of the pooling of resources and use them in ways that avoid the requirement to share profits among the parties.  This report examines how alliance partners can contain opportunism through careful drafting of governance and dispute resolution procedures.

Strategic Planning for Research & Development

The activities of the R&D group should be consistent with, and fully support, the overall business and technology strategy of the company.  As such, the decisions made by senior management regarding the role that technology is expected to play in the company’s overall business strategy will impact the type and scope of the projects to be undertaken by the R&D group, the amount of resources that will be allocated to R&D activities and the manner in which the performance of the R&D group will be measured.  Each of these topics are discussed in this month's report on strategic planning for R&D.

Organizational Design Checklist

This month we present a checklist of certain issues that need to be considered when using Galbraith's Star Model to identify and resolve critical issues that arise in the organizational design process, which calls for balancing the following key design elements: strategy, structure, processes, rewards and people.

Management Studies Training

The interest among scholars in the area of management studies in identifying the most “important” management skills is driven by the desire of management educators to make informed decisions about the curriculum for training students about to enter the workplace and practicing managers looking to be more effective in their current positions and/or move up the ladder in the organizational hierarchy.  This report summarizes some of the basic ideas regarding management skills training include a discussion of the skills that should be incorporated into any training initiative and the components of a suggested skill learning approach.

Technology and Organizational Effectiveness

Technology of some sort is applied at each step along the path of activities of a typical organization--input, conversion and output--and this month's report describes how the chosen and applied technologies can impact the creation of the organization's overall core competencies and potential competitive advantages.

Organizational Design--Definition and Introduction

This month's report provides a brief introduction to the important topic of "organizational design", which is concerned with te factors and issues that must be considered, and the rules and processes that must be implemented, with respect to the design, development, implementation and maintenance of a successful and effective organization.

Key Determinants of Organizational Effectiveness

Whether or not a particular organization will be "effective" depends on the specific circumstances surrounding the creation and maintenance of the organization; however, this month's report identies and briefly explains certain universal issues that leaders of any organization should expect will need to be addressed when preparing an organizational strategy.