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The Congruence Model

Aligning the Drivers of High Performance

Is your organization's performance as good as it could be? What could be changed to improve things and why would this help? Does the key lie in the work itself? Or with the people doing it? Should you reorganize the corporate structure? Or try to change the prevailing culture?

And why does one organization seem to thrive on a certain corporate structure or type of work, while another struggles to make a profit?

The answer lies in understanding the key causes or drivers of performance and the relationship between them. The Congruence Model, first developed by David A Nadler and M L Tushman in the early 1980s, provides a way of doing just this.

It's a powerful tool for finding out what's going wrong with a team or organization, and for thinking about how you can fix it.

Understanding the Tool

The Congruence Model is based on the principle that an organization's performance is derived from four elements: tasks, people, structure, and culture. The higher the congruence, or compatibility, amongst these elements, the greater the performance. For example, if you have brilliant people working for you, but your organization's culture is not a good fit for the way they work, their brilliance will not shine through. Likewise, you can have the latest technology and superbly streamlined processes to support decision making, but if the organizational culture is highly bureaucratic, decisions will undoubtedly still get caught in the quagmire.

To avoid this type of incongruence, the Congruence Model offers a systematic way to consider the root elements that drive organizational performance. The following...(Sign in to read more.)

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