Article review: Aligning Span of Attention The goal of organization design

The authors describe how an organization can be effectively designed. For this he proposes a
framework under which the organization should be designed. The framework consists of four
levers Unit systems, diagnostic control systems, Interactive networks and Shared
responsibility. For applying these levers four parameters should be analysed which are
customer Definition, Critical Performance evaluation, Creative Tension and Commitment to
others. Although the author has described the process but have not given adequate examples
so as how to analyse the organization on these bases and also, he also does not provide any
benchmarks as to which these parameters to be compared to. The author has mentioned
various literature on the organizational design but have not compared his framework to any of
them or as to how his framework incorporates the essence of these theories.

The author first mentions about how the structuring of the organization should be done so as
have an efficient structure to meet the organizational goals. Then he moves on to the micro
level and define Span of attention which is the limited field of view a manger has. He defines
how the Spa of attention is supported by span of control, span of accountability, span of
influence and span of support. Then suggests that to align the span of attention and a
successful implementation of strategy a quantitative relationship between these should be
satisfied:

Span of control + Span of Support = Span of accountability + Span of influence

But does not specifies how these supports to be measured in an organization. The author has
tried to build on the basic theory of accountability and responsibility of organisational design
to suit the changing business environment but fails to quantify these processes. Also, the
authors framework does not have any feedback mechanism on which the organization
performance can be measured and incremental changes can be made.

The ideas proposed by the author are quite interesting and relevant in the present scenario and
would surely help managers in designing new organizations but he does not provide any
information so as how to implement these in an existing organization. Besides this author has
not given any example of an organization who follow this framework while explaining these
theories which could help the reader to understand them in a better way.
The framework provided by him has not been tested in the present world so to judge the
applicability of this theory it must be implemented in an organization. After that further
studies, could be conducted for its validation.