Organizational Development: A Manual for Managers and ... - FPDL

‘A procedure is a series of activities, tasks, steps, decisions, calculations and other processes,
that when undertaken in the sequence laid down produces the described result, product or
outcome. Following a procedure should produce repeatable results for the same input conditions.
For this reason, formal written procedures are usually used in manufacturing and process industry
operations to ensure safety and consistency.’ (www.en.wikipedia.org).
Procedure, as a kind of institutionalized stereotype behaviour, may be formal or informal. It
constitutes a part of the structure not because it is formal, but because it is stable and it woks.
Actual procedures may produce great differences in seemingly the same organizations. Imagine
one department where a clerk, when he needs some supplies, may go to the store and get them,
on his account and responsibility. In another department he should wait a week before the boss
returns from a business trip and allows him to do so. Are these structures the same? Or, another
example, in one organization a client can get a decision straight from the front desk officer, and in
another firm he should apply to the boss when the boss has time to listen him. Is it different?
Any organization possesses a number of procedures, which are more or less determined, and this
‘organizational software’ is an important aspect of a structure.
Formal and real structure
Structure is vitally important because it predetermines the basic emergent features of an
organization. That is true in terms of the actual physical structure of an organization, which
encompasses both formal and informal relations and interactions between components.
No single formal structure is relevant and specific enough to make an organization live. As in a the
case of the ‘Italian strike’, any serious attempt to operate strictly in accordance with given formal
descriptions and instructions (and do nothing that is not provided in the instructions) would block
natural processes and bring any organization to the verge of collapse. Organizations remain alive
not ‘in spite of’ informal interaction and activities, but to a large extent due to them. The more
primitive and irrelevant the formal structure is – the more important the role of the informal
structure remains. In some cases from our practice, the most effective urgent measure to help an
organization at the edge of a catastrophe was just to abolish the formal structure for a while, thus
allowing natural self-organizational processes to accelerate and rescue the situation.
Paradoxically, the formal structure is usually given much more attention by top management. It is
more or less defined, at least partly pictured in charts, with perhaps another part described in
internal regulations and instructions. When something goes wrong, management, if not lazy, tends
to revise this formal structure and find a way to improve it. On the other hand, I’ve met many
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