Organizing for the Future: The New Logic for Managing Complex Organizations (Jossey Bass Business & Management Series)

In an era of accelerating change in the workplace, many organizational designs and management practices - created to work in a stable, predictable world - have rapidly become outmoded. And while in the past companies pursued new competitive advantages through initiatives in productivity, quality, and customer service, there is a growing belief that, in the future, organization design will be the basis for gaining competitive advantage. This book, based on more than ten years of research done at the Center for Effective Organizations at the University of Southern California, explores key issues of organization design and identifies practical new approaches for managing complex organizations to stay competitive in a changing global marketplace. The authors describe how to create an organization with high levels of employee involvement and new roles for managers. They detail the use of new organizational forms, including knowledge work and managerial teams, structuring human resource systems around skill levels and creating such new types of organizations as distributed staffs and virtual networks. And they explain how all organizational structures can be aligned to move information, power, knowledge, and rewards downward to maximize performance throughout the organization.