The Canadian academic, Henry Mintzberg who had trained as a mechanical engineer, wrote his PhD thesis at the MIT Sloan School of Management analysing the actual work habits and time management of chief executive officers (CEOs). In 1973, Mintzberg's thesis on the nature of managerial work was adopted as a study and published for a wider audience. Mintzberg's...

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...

The American academic and consultant, Jay Galbraith, developed the Star Model as an organisational design framework. The model used design policies that guide organisational decision making and behaviour. The model contained the following five categories: 1. Strategy Determines direction through goals, objectives, values...

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...