ABSTRACT
Organization design aims to better align an organization’s capabilities with the demands made by its environment. We start with the assumption that in order to best thrive in dynamic environments, an organization should have distinctive design criteria that help it cope. In this chapter, we use insights from recent development in network theory to propose a set of three criteria for assessing the appropriateness of an organizational design: relationships, redundancy, and representation (the “three Rs”). By relationships, we mean the internal social architecture of an organization—that is, the way in which people are predisposed to interact—and we use Goffee and Jones’ (1998) organizational culture model to demonstrate how distinctive social architectures create unique capabilities. By redundancy, we mean an organization’s ability to create slack capacity from ongoing activity. Organizations constantly trade flexibility for reliability, and redundancy helps optimize this trade-off. By representation, we mean the manner in which the external environment is interpreted and conveyed internally. Since design’s role is to harmonize an organization with its environment, it matters how the environment is socially constructed within an organization. In this chapter we show how each of these three Rs is important to a network view of organization design. Our approach is distinctive in focusing on the organizational level, and our theorizing has important implications for future research in both organization design and network theory.
