Human Resources Strategy and Change: Essentials of Organizational Development

Abstract

In recent years, the design of the organization has increasingly become a crucial factor in an enterprise’s performance. As a result, the skill of assessing one’s own organization and of developing it further in a professional manner has become a new challenge for HR management.

In this chapter, the organizational design is conceptualized against a system-theoretical backdrop. In this theoretical understanding, which is based on Niklas Luhmann, organizations consist not of their members and not of buildings, production facilities, or similar elements, but of specific communicative events that we refer to as decisions. The basic elements of organizations, then, are decisions rather than people. If we take this system-theoretical approach, we understand organizational design as a set of premises that determine the day-to-day decisions and communication channels in an enterprise. The interplay of these premises is illustrated and explained in an integrated depiction of the organizational design. For us, these elements of the organizational design are strategy, formal organization structure, horizontal connections and communication structure, leadership structure and systems, requirements for human resources, business processes, and infrastructure and leadership practice.

This chapter also outlines the assessment and further development of an organizational design. The most important steps in such a sophisticated and demanding development process are communitizing the strategic requirements, reviewing the organization, developing options, taking a design decision, detailing the new design, developing an implementation architecture, and anchoring the design.