The Nadler-Tushman Congruence Model, shown below, was introduced in 1980 in an article in the journal Organizational Dynamics. This model has gained great popularity in the Organizational Behavior community and is commonly taught in graduate Business Administration programs.
The model begins with a set of inputs. These inputs are thought of as outside of the control of the manager of the organization under analysis. The manager is given a strategy. Even if they were part of the development of that strategy, it should be given before the change process. They also have a fixed set of resources and are working in some known environment.
The middle section of the model are the four components in their org that a manager can change. The people and culture axis of this model is sometimes considered the soft access, while the organizational structure and work axis can be referred to as the hard axis. In their paper Nadler and Tushman describe how these four components must fit together, and how to effectively change any of these components a manager must evaluate that change’s impact on the other components. An organization will not operate effectively until they have achieved congruence among these four components.
- People: Who is in the org? How many people? What are their skills?
- Culture: What are the informal processes in the organization?
- Work: What are the formal processes of the organization?
- Org. Structure: How are people structured? What are the teams and sub teams? How are responsibility and accountability assigned?
The final section of the model are the organizational outputs. To measure the effectiveness of changes, organizations need to be able to measure their effectiveness. While this is always an imperfect science, most successful organizations have a set of Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) that they use to measure their success. Organizations that lack an understanding of the Inputs and Outputs will struggle to successfully use this model.
The Nadler-Tushman Congruence Model
Leave a Reply