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Nadler-Tushman Congruence Model

The Nadler-Tushman congruence model reads performance from the fit among the work, the people, the structure, and the culture.

The questionWhere do the work, the people, the formal organization, and the informal organization fail to fit one another, and does that explain the gap in results?

Also called the Congruence Model.

Model · David Nadler and Michael Tushman, 1980

1
Inputs Environment, resources, history
2
Strategy Response and intended results
3
Transformation Work, people, formal, informal
4
Outputs Individual, group, organization

Simplified flow of the congruence model, with four components inside the transformation step.

When to use it

Results are below plan and the explanations from different executives point in different directions: wrong people, wrong structure, wrong culture.
A strategy has changed and you want to see what in the work, people, and organization no longer matches it.
You need a common vocabulary for interviewing a leadership team about how the organization actually runs.
After a merger, two organizations have to be compared piece by piece.

When to avoid it

You need a design to build. The model is diagnostic and says nothing about what a good structure looks like. Galbraith's Star Model is built for that.
The problem is a single broken process. A process analysis will be quicker and more precise.
Leadership, outside pressure, and the dynamics of transformational change are central. Burke-Litwin gives those more room.
The client expects a measured, quantified answer. Fit here is judged from interviews and observation, and two analysts can rate it differently.

Overview

The Congruence Model reads an organization as a system that turns inputs and strategy into outputs through four components: the work, the people, the formal organization, and the informal organization. Performance problems are traced to poor fit between pairs of those components. It supports diagnosis, the step before deciding what to change.

The authors’ hypothesis is that, other things equal, the better the components fit, the more effective the organization. The model describes and does not prescribe. It tells you where things do not fit, not what to build instead. The authors themselves called it one way of thinking about organizations, not the only model and not the best.

The components

Inputs

What the organization starts with and cannot fully choose. The environment it operates in, the resources it has, and its history, including past strategies, crises, and the values they left. History explains a good deal of the informal organization.

Strategy

The decisions about how to respond to the inputs, and the performance the organization is aiming for. It defines the outputs against which fit is judged, so a vague strategy makes the whole diagnosis vague.

Work

The basic work the organization has to do to carry out the strategy, and what it demands, including skills, uncertainty, and how interdependent the tasks are. Many of the other fits are judged against this.

People

The individuals who do the work, with their skills, expectations, needs, and backgrounds. The question is whether the people available match what the work demands and what they want from it.

Formal organization

The designed arrangements, including structure, jobs, processes, formal policies, and reward systems. It is what appears in charts and handbooks.

Informal organization

The unwritten arrangements, including norms, values, power, and the actual way people get things done. This is the part a chart omits, and it usually takes interviews below the executive level to see.

Outputs

What the organization produces at the level of the individual, the group, and the whole organization. A performance gap shows up here, and the diagnosis works backward from it.

What it is not

A set of boxes to fill in. The findings are in the fit between pairs of components. A component described alone says little.
A prescription. It points to mismatches and does not say what to build in their place. That is a design task.
The one right model. The authors themselves wrote that it is only one way of thinking about organizations, and that they could not claim it is the best one.

The steps

Define the output gap

Say which outputs are below target, at the individual, group, and organizational level, and by how much. Use data, not impressions. If different executives name different problems, list them all and treat each as a hypothesis. What comes out is a statement of the gap, current against desired.
Describe the inputs and the strategy

Record the environment, the resources, the history, and the strategic intent, and note what has changed recently. A change in any of these can make a previously good fit poor. What comes out is a short description of the inputs and what the organization is trying to do.
Describe each component as it actually operates

Cover the work, the people, the formal organization, and the informal organization. Use documents for the formal side and interviews and observation for the rest. Ask people below the executive team about the informal organization, since executives tend to describe the chart. What comes out is a description of each component.
Assess the fit of each pair

Four components give six pairs. For each, ask whether the demands and needs of one are met by the other, such as whether the work's demands match the people's skills, and whether the formal structure fits the nature of the work. Rate each pair as good, partial, or poor and write down the evidence. What comes out is a fit assessment with evidence.
Link the misfits to the gap and rank them

Decide which poor fits plausibly explain the output gap, form each into a hypothesis, and test it against further data or interviews. Rank them by how much of the gap they could explain. What comes out is a ranked list of misfits, each with the data that would confirm or refute it.
Hand the result to a design or change effort

The model stops at diagnosis. Pass the ranked misfits to whoever is designing the response, using a design model if one is needed. Name the owner for each. What comes out is a handoff the client can act on.

In practice

The surgical scheduling at a regional hospital group was slipping, and three managers each had a cause. The schedulers were poorly trained. The new software was wrong. The surgeons would not comply. The consultant set those aside and described the four components as they actually operated. The strategy was to raise theater throughput. The work was highly interdependent: a case needs a theater, an anesthetist, a bed downstream, and a surgeon, all at once.

The fit checks did not support any of the three explanations. Schedulers were well qualified for their tasks. The formal organization split the work: schedulers reported to administration, surgeons to clinical directors, and nobody owned theater utilization. The informal organization treated each surgeon's block time as personal property, and nobody had ever challenged that. Interdependent work sat inside a structure and a set of norms that treated it as independent. The finding was about the fit among work, formal arrangements, and informal norms, and it went to the executive team as that.

What you leave with

A statement of the output gap, current against desired, at the individual, group, and organizational levels.
A description of each of the four components as it actually operates, including the informal one.
A fit assessment of each pair, with the evidence behind each rating.
A ranked list of misfits that plausibly explain the gap, each with the data that would confirm or refute it.

Failure points

Describing only the formal organization

The chart and the handbook are easy to get and the informal organization takes interviews. The result is a map of how the organization is supposed to work, and the real fit problems stay hidden.

Fit rated by impression

Nobody defines what good fit would look like for a given pair, so ratings follow the analyst's prior view. Write the criteria before you rate, and record the evidence for each rating.

Starting from the answer

The team already believes the problem is structure, and the model is used to dress that up. The pairs that do not involve structure are rated quickly and left unexamined.

A diagnosis that never leaves the deck

The misfits are accepted and nobody owns them. The model has no step that makes someone act, so the handoff has to be set up explicitly.

A tight fit with the wrong strategy

The components can fit one another well and still fit a strategy or environment that no longer exists. Check the inputs and strategy before judging the fit among components.

The failures above are usually Framing: the wrong problem was chosen before this framework was applied.

Origin

David Nadler and Michael Tushman set out the model in "A Model for Diagnosing Organizational Behavior," published in Organizational Dynamics in autumn 1980. The article builds explicitly on earlier fit ideas, naming George Homans, Harold Leavitt, Paul Lawrence and Jay Lorsch, and others, and it treats the organization as an open system that turns inputs into outputs. The authors later developed the approach for executives in the book Competing by Design (1997).

You will see the four central components labeled in different ways. Work is sometimes called the critical tasks, people are sometimes called individuals, and the culture is the informal organization. No trademark claim is known for the model, and the original article is behind a publisher paywall. This note describes the model in its own words.