Fashioning the right business structures

By Andrew Mendes

Management theorist Henry Mintzberg places business organizational structures into the following five categories:

1.      The Simple structure (for organizations comprising fewer than twenty persons)

2.     The traditional machine bureaucracy or hierarchical structure,

3.      The professional bureaucracy (reflective of law offices),

4.      The divisionalised structure (modified hierarchy),  and

5.      The ad-hocracy or organic structure.

Mintzberg contends that in order to be effective, the organizational structure of a business must reflect