Page 114 - MS Year in Review 2020

Developmental Emphasis at Different Stages of Growth

The emphasis that should be given to each task differs depending on the size of the
firm. Organizations experience developmental problems if their infrastructure is not

consistent with their size. The coincident relationship with size and organizational
structure leads to an organizational life cycle model that complements the

Organizational Development Pyramid. 103

A detailed description of this model is beyond the scope of this article, but it is
examined in detail in Eric G. Flamholtz and Yvonne Randle, Growing Pains: Building
Sustainably Successful Organizations. 104 In brief, each stage of growth is viewed as

having a set of critical developmental tasks. For example, the critical tasks at Stage
I (the start-up of an entrepreneurial new venture) are markets and products, while
at Stage III the critical task is the development of management systems.

Model of Organizational Infrastructure Dysfunction (“Growing Pains”)

Another notion of the theoretical framework is that when the top four levels of the

Pyramid, (which comprise the “infrastructure” of the firm) is not developed
sufficiently as required by the given stage of growth, there will be an
“organizational development gap,” or gap between the level of the infrastructure

required by the enterprise and its actual infrastructure.

This developmental gap causes the enterprise to experience “growing pains,” which

are symptoms of organizational distress experienced by entrepreneurial firms. A set
of ten classic growing pains have been identified by previous research (Flamholtz

and Randle, 2016) and experience. They are shown in Exhibit A of the previous
article. 105

103 See Eric G. Flamholtz (1995). Managing Organizational Transitions: Implications for Corporate
and Human Resource Management. European Management Journal, 13 (1), 39-51
104 Eric G. Flamholtz and Yvonne Randle, Growing Pains: Building Sustainably Successful
organizations, Fifth Edition, Wiley, 2016, Chapters 3-4.
105 Eric Flamholtz, “Is Tesla Being “Built for Sustainable Success”℠? Linkedin, September 2. 2020.
See also Eric G. Flamholtz and Yvonne Randle, Growing Pains: Building Sustainably Successful
organizations, Fifth Edition, Wiley, 2016, Chapters 3-4.

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