Exploring the Duality between Product and Organizational Architectures: A Test of the Mirroring Hypothesis

41 Pages Posted: 13 Mar 2008 Last revised: 28 Jan 2011

See all articles by Alan MacCormack

Alan MacCormack

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - Sloan School of Management

John Rusnak

Harvard Business School

Carliss Y. Baldwin

Harvard Business School

Date Written: January 25, 2011

Abstract

A variety of academic studies argue that a relationship exists between the structure of an organization and the design of the products that this organization produces. Specifically, products tend to “mirror” the architectures of the organizations in which they are developed. This dynamic occurs because the organization’s governance structures, problem solving routines and communication patterns constrain the space in which it searches for new solutions. Such a relationship is important, given that product architecture has been shown to be an important predictor of product performance, product variety, process flexibility and even the path of industry evolution.

We explore this relationship in the software industry. Our research takes advantage of a natural experiment, in that we observe products that fulfill the same function being developed by very different organizational forms. At one extreme are commercial software firms, in which the organizational participants are tightly-coupled, with respect to their goals, structure and behavior. At the other, are open source software communities, in which the participants are much more loosely-coupled by comparison. The mirroring hypothesis predicts that these different organizational forms will produce products with distinctly different architectures. Specifically, loosely-coupled organizations will develop more modular designs than tightly-coupled organizations. We test this hypothesis, using a sample of matched-pair products.

We find strong evidence to support the mirroring hypothesis. In all of the pairs we examine, the product developed by the loosely-coupled organization is significantly more modular than the product from the tightly-coupled organization. We measure modularity by capturing the level of coupling between a product’s components. The magnitude of the differences is substantial – up to a factor of eight, in terms of the potential for a design change in one component to propagate to others. Our results have significant managerial implications, in highlighting the impact of organizational design decisions on the technical structure of the artifacts that these organizations subsequently develop.

Suggested Citation

MacCormack, Alan and Rusnak, John and Baldwin, Carliss Y., Exploring the Duality between Product and Organizational Architectures: A Test of the Mirroring Hypothesis (January 25, 2011). Harvard Business School Technology & Operations Mgt. Unit Research Paper No. 08-039, Harvard Business School Finance Working Paper No. 08-039, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1104745 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1104745

Alan MacCormack (Contact Author)

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - Sloan School of Management ( email )

100 Main Street
E62-416
Cambridge, MA 02142
United States

John Rusnak

Harvard Business School ( email )

Soldiers Field Road
Morgan 270C
Boston, MA 02163
United States

Carliss Y. Baldwin

Harvard Business School ( email )

Boston, MA 02163
United States

Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?

Paper statistics

Downloads
493
Abstract Views
3,737
Rank
105,828
PlumX Metrics