The Relationship between Organizational Structure and Organizational Strategy: Case Study of Shiraz University of Medical Sciences

The structure of an organization is designed to implement and to enforce the organization's strategy; hence, paying specific attention to the relationship of these two is essential for an organization’s survival. Therefore, this paper aimed at studying the relationship between the organizational structure and organizational strategy in the teaching hospitals of Shiraz University of Medical Sciences in 2016.
This cross-sectional descriptive study was conducted in 10 teaching hospitals in Shiraz University of Medical Sciences. The statistical population consisted of internal, administrative, financial, accounting and nursing managers among them 40 individuals (4 from each hospital) were selected by census to participate in this study. The data-collection instruments were a 22-item Robin's organizational structure questionnaire and Miles and Snow strategic framework to measure organizational strategy. The data were analyzed using SPSS software and the statistical test employed was Pierson Correlation. The level of significance was determined at 0.05.
Among all the dimensions of organizational structure, all three dimensions including ‘formalization’ (23.40±3.25), ‘complexity’ (20.82±3.15) and ‘centralization’ (30.32±5.26) on hospitals studied were at a high level. Furthermore, the dominant strategy for all hospitals was analytic. The results also showed a significant relationship between the dominant strategy and dimensions of ‘formalization’ (P= 0.03) and ‘complexity’ (P= 0.026). Furthermore, with the P-value of 0.23, the result indicated that there was no statistically significant relationship between organizational strategy and organizational structure in hospitals.
There was no significant relationship between organizational strategy and organizational structure. According to this result, if hospitals tend to follow analytical strategies, they should reduce their ‘complexity’ and ‘centralization’, and there should be strict control over their current activities and limited control over new ones.