Four Lenses on Organizational Effectiveness

Bob: I can relate to how the Wright brothers felt when they had to figure out how to create controls. When I finished graduate school and took my first job as an assistant professor, I was trying to understand organizational effectiveness. Organizational scholars realized that effectiveness must involve more than one measure of performance, but they did not agree on which measures they should use to determine their effectiveness. To learn how to make a heavier-than-air machine fly, the Wright brothers requested literature to read from the Smithsonian Institution. To solve the problem of understanding and measuring effectiveness, I devoured the research literature on organizational effectiveness. Reading the literature from the Smithsonian led the Wright brothers to realize that a heavier-than-air machine would not be able to fly until the problem of flight controls had been addressed. Reading the literature on organizational effectiveness led me to realize that we could not understand what makes organizations effective if we could not even agree on what effectiveness was. The Wright brothers recognized the need to reframe the problem as one of building an unstable-but-controllable machine, but they had to figure out how. I recognized the need to think differently about effectiveness, but I did not know how.

The Wright brothers found the inspiration they needed to solve one of the problems when Wilbur was absent-mindedly twisting a rectangular cardboard box. As he twisted it he realized that the box retained its stiffness from side to side. If that was true of a cardboard box, then it would also be true of the wings of a biplane. If one set of wings met the oncoming air at a different angle than the wings on the other side, then each side of the wings would experience a different degree of lift, banking the aircraft to one side or the other and enabling the pilot to maintain balance and to turn the aircraft. The Wright brothers built a large model aircraft with this design and flew it like a kite in the summer of 1899. To their delight, the model responded to their controls immediately and exactly, suggesting that a full-size aircraft might do the same.

Bob: My colleague John Rohrbaugh and I had an insight that reframed the problem of organizational effectiveness in a way that was similar to the Wright Brothers' reframing of the problem of controlling an unstable airplane. In a conversation with John, I explained that everyone studying organizational effectiveness was using different definitions and measurements. John replied, "Instead of studying organizational effectiveness, why don't you study how people perceive organizational effectiveness?" This idea had never occurred to me. But like Wilbur Wright twisting a cardboard box and coming up with an idea that nobody else had thought of, this new question enabled John and I to come up with an entirely new perspective.

We became excited as we discussed this question. We realized that the effectiveness of an organization depends on who is judging that effectiveness, and that meant that we should study the people who study organizations. This would help us to see if there were any patterns in all of the different claims about what effectiveness was. If there were patterns, then we would be able to have a much more informed conversation about what makes an organization effective and what needs to be done to accomplish that effectiveness.

To study how people perceived effectiveness, John and I identified the criteria that we found in the research literature (such as profit, quality, or growth, as shown in figure 2.1). We asked experts to rate how similar they thought each criterion was to each of the other criteria. Analyzing these ratings we found that all of the criteria could be mapped along two dimensions. One dimension (the vertical line in figure 2.1, labeled "Flexible Structures" in the top half and "Stable Structures" in the bottom half) describes how flexible or stable an organization's structure is. The second dimension (the horizontal line in figure 2.1, labeled "Internal Focus" in the left half and "External Focus" in the right half) describes the degree to which an organization focuses on internal or external issues. When we lay these two dimensions one on top of the other, they create four quadrants: four ways in which we can understand an organization's effectiveness: competitiveness, collaboration, control, and creativity.

The competitiveness lens defines effectiveness in terms of how productive and competitive an organization is, using criteria such as profit, goals, and efficiency.

The collaboration lens defines effectiveness in terms of how collaborative and developmental an organization is, using criteria such as morale, quality, and training.

The control lens defines effectiveness in terms of how reliable and accountable an organization is, using criteria such as information use, stability, and control.

The creativity lens defines effectiveness in terms of how adaptable and innovative an organization is, using criteria such as adaptation, growth, and utilization.

Using these four lenses we can identify the underlying values in anyone's approach to organizational effectiveness and help him or her take a more complete approach. Researchers who studied topics related to effectiveness tended to use many criteria from one lens (such as the competitiveness quadrant), a few criteria from the two lenses next to the first lens (such as the control and creativity quadrants), and no criteria (or almost no criteria) from the opposite quadrant (such as the collaboration quadrant). In other words, we found that most researchers were systematically biased in their beliefs about effectiveness: they would exhibit favoritism for the values represented by one quadrant and prejudice against the values represented by the opposing quadrant, even though values in all four quadrants were positive ones.

We find that most people, without knowing anything about this framework, behave just like the researchers who studied organizational effectiveness. They apply negative labels to values in the quadrants that are on the opposite side of the framework from the values they prefer. For example, people who favor competitive values tend to call collaborative values "soft" or "unproductive," whereas people who favor collaborative values tend to call competitive values "cutthroat" or "selfish." Because of this tendency, we called the framework created by these four lenses the competing values framework. Like the Wright brothers after trying their ideas out with their model glider, we were now ready to begin using this framework to help lift people and their organizations to higher levels of effectiveness.