Three Implementations of a Decentralized Organization Design
The Implementation of A Decentralized Organization Design in Three Large Public School Districts: Edmonton, Seattle, and Houston By William G. Ouchi Anderson School of Management UCLA 110 Westwood Plaza, Suite B523 Los Angeles, California 90095-1481 July 30, 2004 This research was funded through grants from the National Science Foundation (Grant # 0115559), Dr. Peter Bing, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Frank and Kathy Baxter Family Foundation, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. The author wishes to acknowledge the work done on this project by Bruce S. Cooper, Lydia G. Segal, Carolyn Brown, Timothy DeRoche, Elizabeth Galvin, John Gabree, Bernice Tsai, James Mirocha, Stephanie Kagimoto, Kristina Tipton, and Jennifer Riss. I also received helpful suggestions on early drafts from Fred Ali, Christine Beckman, Tom Boysen, Gloria Chalmers, Beverly Donohue, Harry Handler, Tom Hofstedt, Sanford Jacoby, Dan Katzir, Barbara Lawrence, Paul Lawrence, David Lewin, Allan Odden, Janice Riddell, Randy Ross, Morton Schapiro, Dorothy Siegel, Olav Sorenson, Deborah Stipek, Kaye Stripling, Joseph Viteritti, and Oliver Williamson, for which I am grateful. Abstract Although the study of organization design can be traced to the study of public school districts beginning in 1955, school districts themselves have been immune to organizational re-design until very recently. Three large school districts have recently undertaken structural redesign along the lines of the multidivisional form that is well established in large businesses. These three are compared to three large districts that are in the traditional centralized form and to large Catholic school systems. Measures of performance indicate that decentralization has yielded large improvements in student achievement and in organizational efficiency.
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