In his work, "Understanding Organisations", the British management writer, Charles Handy, listed over sixty factors that influence the effectiveness of organisations. For Handy, work motivation is one of the key variables of organisational performance and he introduced the concept 'motivation calculus' to better understand this variable. His motivation formula...

Michael Porter's innovative research in the 1980's changed managers' perceptions of their own industry's importance as a factor for their company's strategy. Business unit managers would now have to study their industry's characteristics since an industry's structure determines its relative economic attractiveness and hence, the profit potential of all companies...

The Canadian academic, Henry Mintzberg, distinguished six coordination mechanisms from organisational design literature. Any group of individuals that needs to accomplish a complex task faces two opposing requirements: the division of labour of the task into subtasks to support specialisation, and the coordination of these subtasks to accomplish the overall...

By the late 1960's, the American academic, James Thompson, overcame a major limitation of Woodward's earlier technology typology by including both manufacturing and service organisations. Technology, an important factor in contingency theory, assumed that the type of technology determined an organisation's most effective internal structure. Thompson based...