Abstract

The article tries to integrate diverse approaches to consideration of the human element in organizational design. It looks at why people are important, what about them is important, and discusses the impact of these things on organizational design. It presents a model for viewing and understanding potential design options that respond to the human constraint. Organizations see people as resources-replaceable, trainable, suitable for many different purposes. The major human problem for organizations lies at that interface between employees as humans and employees as resources. This is a particularly critical problem as people become less willing to accept roles as merely resources. Organizations have traditionally been designed to deal with only the skills and abilities of their employees, not whole persons. Organizations must deal with all parts of their employees-their memories, motivations, expectations, aspirations, attitudes, and feelings, all of which insist on coming to work with them.