A Quantitative Research of Small Public Organizations : Size, Task Environment, and Organizational Structure of Municipalities.

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Our thorough literature review revealed that research concerning small municipal organizations was not conduced in Japan except some qualitative studies, though several projects concerning large cities were conducted. This project elicited some hypotheses applicable to small municipalities from preceding organizational studies on private for-profit organizations.A series of case studies discovered that variety of tasks were assigned and carried out in a single subunit in small municipal organizations, which sometimes caused good results in terms of effectiveness. In addition, some municipality strategically combined a pair of tasks that would have been implemented by two differentiated subunits in ordinary cases, especially in large organizations.Through quantitative analysis, we tested some hypotheses and found that there was correlation between size of small municipality and differentiation of subunits, and that there was no correlation between environmental uncertainty and organizational structure.