Effectiveness requires internal fit between structure, strategy and environment, so no structure is good in isolation.
Mintzberg's 1979 configurations: simple structure, machine bureaucracy, professional bureaucracy, divisionalised form, adhocracy. The claim is that each is coherent, so borrowing pieces across them produces incoherence.
In practice
- A firm bolts a startup's flat structure onto a machine bureaucracy and gets neither speed nor reliability.
- A school adopts a research university's departmental autonomy with a school's timetable, and the autonomy has nowhere to operate.