Strategic Lean Organizational Design: Towards Lean World-Small World Configurations through Discrete Dynamic Organizational Motifs

Organizations face strong international competition in the global market arena in achieving strategic goals such as high quality of product or service at lower cost while increasing their ability to respond quickly to requirements of the market. These challenges concern strategically designing organizations that can meet global challenges and specialize locally to meet performance constraints. After introducing the concept of organizational functional and structural motifs as small organizational building block, our findings suggest the hypothesis that a strategic organizational design (SOD) approach to meet these challenges involves maximizing the number and diversity of functional motifs, while minimizing the repertoire of structural motifs. By detecting characteristic structural motifs, we provide organizational leaders with specific Lean SOD solutions with which to meet local and global challenges simultaneously. As a matter of application, we show the implementation of such an SOD approach in nine US hospitals that form one large health care holding.