THE PATTERN OF ENTERPRISE ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE DEVELOPMENT: LESSONS OF HISTORY

Abstract

Through analyzing the research done by leading academics of different countries the article demonstrates that organization development is always accompanied by repeated changes in their organizational structure. The author puts forward the hypothesis that such changes in the structure are regular and typical of the majority of organizations, whose evolution aims at efficiency improvement. For the last thousand years global economy has passed a long way from craftsman (consecutive organizational structure) to their shops (parallel structure) through factory production (again consecutive structure), from developing horizontally integrated sectoral corporations and enterprises of one sector (parallel) to subsequent vertical integration on the basis of the previous stage (consecutive) and again to horizontal integration of these vertically integrated companies (parallel). Knowing the pattern of organizational structure development could have positive impact on optimal decision-making both for certain enterprises and for society in general.

Keywords

• consecutive organizational structure
• parallel organizational structure
• regularity
• organization development