A central task of management is to reach the organization’s goals by motivating individual workers and coordinating their diverse efforts. Although the concepts and methods used to structure work have changed considerably over the years, many firms see no need to change their methods of management. As a result, a company’s age is often indicated by the way work is structured, because work practices tend to reflect the organizational structures and methods that were common when the organization was founded. Although most firms draw from the strengths of various managerial forms, work structure can fall into one of two categories: those that are hierarchical and traditional and those that are participatory and flexible.

Much of the early thinking about organizational design can be traced to the influence of Frederick W. Taylor’s scientific management movement and the division-of-labour concepts found in Max Weber’s description of the ideal bureaucracy. Although many of these concepts originated in the 19th century, they endured because they advanced the needs of the modern corporation, which has come to be defined by its multiple divisions and functions. Formal bureaucratic rules, specialization of functions, and close supervision proved suitable for disciplining and directing an immigrant and poorly educated labour force in factories geared to mass production markets. The phenomenal success of manufacturing organizations in the first half of the 20th century reinforced managerial faith in these systems and provided workers with sufficient improvements in income and standard of living to support their continuity. Furthermore, labour movements adapted well to this organizational framework, and the collective bargaining systems that developed in the 20th century provided workers with the opportunity to have their voices heard, if only indirectly, through union representatives. As a result, unions strengthened the division of labour in industrial settings.

Taylor’s concept of scientific management was based on a clear separation of authority between (a) the engineers and supervisors, who decided how to organize the work, and (b) the production employees, who carried out their boss’s orders. Scientific management also emphasized narrow job definitions and clear divisions of labour between jobs, thereby accommodating the low levels of education or skills expected of production workers. Finally, scientific management emphasized individual incentive wages. In this way, companies sought to maximize employee motivation by paying each worker for the output he or she produced. This approach was also meant to overcome any presumed conflict of interest between the worker and the firm.

When the industrial unions that grew rapidly after the 1930s inherited this form of work organization, they generally accepted it, but they codified job descriptions, negotiated wage rates for each job, and established principles of seniority to govern worker rights to different jobs and workplace benefits. All these provisions were written into a collective bargaining contract, and disputes over interpretation of the contract were resolved through grievance arbitration.

The production area was not the only part of the organization to undergo such rigid job classification. A company’s managerial and technical hierarchies were also structured according to job functions or department classifications. Specialization of function and clear lines of authority separated managers so that each was assigned to one department (such as marketing, sales, finance, personnel, production, or engineering). Within the engineering and new-product development process similar specialized tasks separated design engineers, manufacturing engineers, industrial engineers, and so on. As departments and managerial tasks grew more specialized, a large cadre of middle managers was required to produce the financial and performance reports needed by top executives for monitoring and directing company-wide operations.

These organizational design principles allowed large manufacturing firms around the world to use their economies of scale to improve productivity and increase profits. Sharing the fruits of these economic returns with the labour force in turn produced a stable industrial relations system.

By the 1960s many of these traditional principles of organization and work group design were being challenged by early advocates of participatory management. Arguments for enlarging the scope of responsibilities and influence of individual workers were presented as better means of motivating workers and increasing job satisfaction. While these ideas gained favour in a number of the new companies and high-technology industries that grew rapidly through the 1960s and ’70s, it was not until the following decade that they began to gain support within older organizations in the manufacturing and service sectors.

Competition from other countries magnified the significant productivity and quality performance problems that most American firms faced in the 1980s. At the time, Japanese and some European firms outperformed their American counterparts by adopting flexible work systems and participatory management practices. Japanese manufacturing firms in particular had instituted practices such as quality circles that were designed to produce continuous improvement. These approaches, articulated first by W. Edwards Deming, relied on knowledgeable workers who were authorized to interrupt the production process when they detected defects.

The development and implementation of electronic and computerized technologies that began in the 1980s reinforced the need for flexibility in the work organization. Competitive pressures continued to break down many of the traditional dividing lines that had grown out of older and more restrictive job definitions.

Critics of the new technologies argued that these approaches essentially took jobs away from many clerical and blue-collar workers while also giving managers new methods for controlling employees and invading their privacy. For example, computers and surveillance cameras can monitor the work of machine operators and therefore serve as a new form of electronic supervision. This approach replaces the personal presence and control of the supervisor or production foreman. The introduction of new technologies also displaces—and in some cases replaces—personnel, posing a threat to the job security and economic well-being of the workers affected. Thus, a critical challenge facing managers, worker representatives, and public policymakers lies in the management of technological and organizational change that will benefit not only individual firms but also the work force and the larger society.