Abstract
Pure bureaucratic organizations don’t work well in dynamic environments due to their low bandwidth and limited adaptability - although they are known to be highly scalable, replicable and sustainable. Pure relational organizations are highly effective in dynamic environments given their high bandwidth, adaptability and support for collaboration - but they are challenging to scale, replicate and sustain over time. There has been much innovation in the fields of organizational sociology, organization design, and organizational consulting recognizing the advantages of both bureaucratic and relational organizations and suggesting potential hybrids - such as post-bureaucracy (Donnellon & Heckscher, 1994), enabling bureaucracy (Adler & Borys.1996), ambidexterity (O’Reilly & Tushman, 2008),
We focus in this essay on relational bureaucracy as a hybrid design that seeks to capture the advantages of the pure bureaucratic and the pure relational forms (Gittell & Douglass, 2012; Douglass & Gittell, 2012). Relational bureaucracy distinguishes between structures and relationships, while seeing structures and relationships as forming two ends of a continuum. Relational bureaucracy shows how to scale, replicate and sustain role-based reciprocal relationships using structures that are intentionally designed for this purpose, building on relational coordination theory.