Bhavitha Pandrangi
Human Resources
August 2025
Startups are important drivers of innovation, employment generation and economic development, but their sustainability is regularly jeopardized by processional and managerial inefficiency. This paper is going to investigate the role of organizational design in the life and death of young firms, and more precisely in four of its main characteristics: formalization, scalability, agility, and communication. The study adopts the combined qualitative-quantitative approach, incorporating the information obtained in case studies (e.g., Zomato and Theranos) with a virtual sample of 110 startups coded according to the organizational design attributes. The results show that formalization (29.1%) is most frequent adopted attribute, followed by scalability (25.5%) and then agility (23.6%), and communication (21.8%). The results indicate that well-structured and scalable designs have their respective survival as well as growth increased (41.8% and 34.5 %) where structured designs with poor designs have survival and growth diminished (23.6 %). Organizational requirements also differ by stages in the life-cycle where greater flexibility is required in the inception phase, formalization in survival, scalability in success, and agility in renewal. The big challenges pointed out comprise of role ambiguity, poor communication, mismanagement, and lack of trust.
514- 527
© Airo Journals 2021
