Considers the Aston group's contention that Weber's concept of the bureaucratic type is no longer useful. Concludes that the main variables in the Aston group's research are scalar, not vector, quantities. A number of reinterpretations of the Aston variables are presented, and the abandonment of bureaucratic type is found to be premature. The…

Clarifies the meaning of organizational decline by delimiting it from related constructs (turbulence, stagnation, and environmental decline). Investigates certain organizational attributes associated with turbulence and decline in 334 higher education institutions over a six-year period. Results suggest that organizational attributes associated…

Information-processing ideas are used to develop a set of hypotheses to test a contingency approach to subunit structure directly; whether high-performing subunits with different information-processing requirements have systematically different degrees of communication structure. (Author)

Organizational, work role, and behavioral variables are explored in a sample of 787 senior British managers working in 78 business organizations. Structuring of activities is found to be associated with higher levels of conflict and hardly at all with conforming behavior; while centralization is associated with higher levels of conforming…

Reviews contingency and universalistic theoretical rationales linking satisfaction and conflict to organic and mechanistic styles of structure and control. Results indicate that contingency variables are frequently as good as, or even better than, universalistic variables as predictors of satisfaction and conflict. (Author/IRT)

This study examines culture-free and culture-bound hypotheses used to explain organizational structures. A survey of Hong Kong Chinese managerial employees in 20 multinational banks examined work satisfaction with relation to organizational structure, controlling for job structure and individual attributes. Findings generally supported the…

Investigates how administrative complexity (in funding and personnel) of American public school districts varies, depending on the importance of local, state, and federal funding environments. Dependence on federal funding generates the most administrative intensity, while state funding generates the least administrative intensity. High local…

An overview is provided of the research conducted in Japan during the past 30 years on the Performance-Maintenance Theory of Leadership. Experimental and field studies are described which suggest that the consequences of leadership in Japan result from interaction of performance-oriented and maintenance-oriented behaviors. (TE)