Abstract
Statistico-organizational theory is a new organizational theory and this chapter suggests how it may contribute some new insights to organizational design. Statistico-organizational theory uses ideas from statistics to explain errors made by managers when drawing inferences from numerical data in their organization. For example, small numbers of observations cause random error, whereas large organizations may aggregate their data and so avoid having small numbers of observations. However, such data aggregation requires some standardization, formalization, and centralization of parts of the organizational design that deal with data recording and collation. Also, profit is prone to measurement error, rendering the divisional organizational design problematic.
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Donaldson, L. (2012). Statistico-Organizational Theory: A New Theoretical Approach to Organizational Design. In: Bøllingtoft, A., Donaldson, L., Huber, G., Håkonsson, D., Snow, C. (eds) Collaborative Communities of Firms. Information and Organization Design Series, vol 9. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-1284-7_8
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