Professional Bureaucracy
The Basic Idea
Picture a company with 20 people and a company with 200 people. How do you imagine each might operate? Would they have a similar organizational structure, or would there be different positions based on the size of the company? Maybe you pictured the company with 200 people to be more structured in responsibilities and knowledge. Following the organizational structure of a professional bureaucracy, this would certainly be the case.
Within a professional bureaucracy, there is a key group of employees with whom middle managers interact - they are the professional operating core of the organization.1 In this case, “professional” refers to the standardization of skills, such that jobs are highly specialized so workers are trained extensively on the skills required for their role. This tends to encourage some decentralization, since it is difficult for those in higher positions of power to possess all the specialized skills required across roles. Professional bureaucracies are typically found in complex but stable environments such as hospitals and schools.
Organizations should be built and managers should be functioning so people can be naturally empowered. If someone’s doing their job, if someone’s working in one of your warehouses, say, they should know their job better than anybody. They don’t need to be ‘empowered,’ but encouraged and left alone to be able to do what they know best.
– Henry Mintzberg, organization and management researcher
