Psychological and Traditional Determinants of Structure.

The authors would like to thank Jean-Marie Toulouse and Jeannine Robichaud for their help with the data gathering and sample design, Richard Germain for his advice and analytical contributions to the LISREL analysis, Morty Yalovsky, Peter H. Friesen, Donald C. Hambrick, Alex Whitmore, and Richard P. Bagozzi for their suggestions, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Government of Quebec FCAC program, respectively, for grants #494-84-0012 and #EQ1 867. A study was undertaken to examine the relationships of chief executive need for achievement and the traditional contingencies of size, technology, and environmental uncertaintywith organizational structure. A number of models relating the structural constructs of formalization, centralization, and integration with their hypothesized determinants were examined using LISREL and multipleregression analyses. CEO need for achievement and size were found to have the strongest relationships to most structural constructs; technology and uncertainty had very little impact on structure. The relationships between need for achievement and structure were usually highest in samples of small and young firms, suggesting that CEO personality might be influencing structure, rather than the reverse.