The U.S. Postal Service Organizational Structure

The USPS chief executive in 1993 stated that the implementation of team organization, employee empowerment, and other human resource initiatives will enable the USPS to attain productivity-related goals in the last-half of the 1990s (Cockburn, 1993). Unfortunately, at the operational level, the USPS continues to be an organization that is plagued by lower-level managers who are not sympathetic to change. These lower-level managers are a threat to the ultimate success of the drive to improve productivity at the USPS.

One potential cause of the productivity problem at the USPS is the organization's structure. Two primary classifications of organizational structure are mechanistic and organic. The differences between mechanistic and organic organizational structures are expressed in the context of the level of formal structure and control embodied in the two organizational concepts (Daft, 1992). The character of an organization's internal structure is often related to the external environment within which it functions. In this context, Warren Bennis (1976) observed that organizations must strike a balance between openness to the external environment and protection from too much permeability. Organizations functioning within a stable external environment typically have formal internal organizational structures with clearly established and observed operating procedures and rules, and a we

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racterized by equifinality, which simply means there exist a variety of paths by which a system may arrive at the same final destination. Business organizations, are open systems. The business organization's "set of interrelated elements à acquires inputs from the environment, transforms them, and discharges outputs into the external environment" (Daft, 1992, p. 10). Business organizations are also social systems, in that humans, as sentient beings, are the basic building blocks of the organization as a system. As was stated in the first stage of this analysis: "One potential cause of the productivity problem at the USPS is the organization's structure." This first stage of the analysis went on to state that: "In the context of formalization, the USPS tends to be more formal than do most private sector organizations. Communications within such formal organizations tends to be highly structured. Thus, the implementation of productivity improvement programs in the USPS tends to be in the form of a command, as opposed to a human resources policy with input from both management and employees." The USPS, thus, does not act effectively as an open system. Rather, the organization tends to react as a semi-closed system. The str
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Approximate Word count = 1855
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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