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Organizational design often focuses on structural alternatives such as matrix, decentralization, and divisionalization. However, control variables (e.g. reward structures, task characteristics, and information systems) offer a more flexible approach. The purpose of this paper is to explore these control variables for organizational design. This is accomplished by integration and testing of two perspectives, organization theory and economics, notably agency theory. The resulting hypotheses link task characteristics, information systems, and business uncertainty to behavior vs. outcome based control strategy. These hypothesized linkages are examined empirically in a field study of the compensation practices for retail salespeople in 54 stores. The findings are that task programmability is strongly related to the choice of compensation package. The amount of behavioral measurement, the cost of measuring outcomes, and the uncertainty of the business also affect compensation. The findings have management implications for the design of compensation and reward packages, performance evaluation systems, and control systems, in general. Such systems should explicitly consider the task, the information system in place to measure performance, and the riskiness of the business. More programmed tasks require behavior based controls while less programmed tasks require more elaborate information systems or outcome based controls. (Reprinted by Permission of Publisher.)

Planning is a process of inquiry. Inquiry can be enhanced if different views-of-the-world are used to inform each other. In an exploratory field study, a sense-making exercise was used in the initial, goal definition stage of planning. Its use is antithetical because sense-making denies that management action is based on preconceived goals or objectives. Instead, sense-making assumes management action is a continuous, equivocal stream of experience that can only be understood (or made sense of) when it is viewed in retrospect. Accounting reports were prepared to describe a fictitious, but plausible future scenario for an organization. A number of alternative future directions that the organization could have followed-different kinds of organization it could have become-were used as a basis for creating the accounting reports. The management group then imagined themselves even further out into the future, looking back over the accounting data. They tried to understand what they had done during this period, why they had done it, and how they felt about having done it. The impact of this exercise on the managers' cognitive and emotional experience and their commitment to use the method in other decisions suggest that sense-making can enhance the group process of inquiry during the initial stages of planning. (Reprinted by Permission of Publisher.)

In order to understand how strategies, structures and environments interrelate, one must study an organization's historical evolution. Longitudinal analysis methods must be used. There are five stages in the growth of an organization - birth, growth, maturity, revival, and decline. A table describes for each stage the organization's structure, environment, degree of innovation and strategy. Other tables give statistical results for strategy, situation, structure, and decision making style.

Effectivenss is the key goal of organizational analysis. Few can agree on a definition of effectiveness however. A spatial model for effectiveness has been developed that identifies the most central concepts. Four middle-range approaches are presented. Each is based on different clusterings of these central concepts. The overall model makes the pertinent values in the effectiveness construct explicit. The researcher then knows what value choices have been made. The competing values model can be presented in order to clarify the extent to which certain concepts are valued. Diagrams of models are available.

Closed system models of organizations have been replaced by open system models. Open models allow uncertainty due to the organizational environment. A customer contact model specifies how to decouple and regroup organizational subunits depending on customer contact. The model holds that service systems should be viewed as falling along a continuum from high customer contact to low contact during the creation of the service product. A block diagram shows manufacturing and service models.