Organisational behaviour
Greiner’s growth model
Recognize and transition through different phases of company growth.
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Greiner’s growth model vs Growth and crisis (Greiner)
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Strategy
Growth and crisis (Greiner)
the diagram below Growth and crisis model
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Use this when.
To recognise organisational pressures associated with different phases of growth and prepare a transition.
Use it when growth is straining the organisation’s existing leadership, structure or coordination practices, and a transition could become a crisis.
Extracted signals
Strengths, limits, and pitfalls.
Greiner’s growth model
- Collect evidence from founders, frontline employees, middle managers and central functions before naming a phase. Identify the management practice that once helped growth but now constrains it, then design a transition that preserves its remaining value while changing the bottleneck.
- Diagnose behaviour before choosing a phase. Interview people across levels and units, review decision delays, customer effects, duplicated work, risk events, turnover and financial capacity.
- In phase 1, ask whether informal leadership and cash can support the next scale of operation. In phase 2, test whether decision concentration is delaying local action; a business with up to 250 employees can still exhibit either informal or bureaucratic coordination, so headcount is not a diagnosis.
Watch for
- Do not fit the organisation retrospectively to a deterministic sequence or blame people for a “natural” crisis. Age does not automatically make managers rigid, alliances do not guarantee renewed growth and more control is not always the cure for delegation. Test alternative explanations and local context.
Growth and crisis (Greiner)
- Identify the capability that the next phase requires before changing the organisation chart. Decision rights, leadership behaviour, information and incentives must reinforce one another.
- Diagnose the dominant management logic rather than assigning the business a label solely by age or headcount. Which practices currently enable growth? Where are they generating friction? Does the pattern resemble one of Greiner’s transition tensions, and would the practices associated with the next phase address the actual cause?
- Look for observable warning signals: decisions bottlenecking at the top, inconsistent local choices, procedures obstructing frontline work, meetings displacing customer attention, perceived unfairness in rewards or rising unwanted turnover. Validate the diagnosis through data and conversations across levels.
Watch for
- Do not treat the sequence as a law of organisational development. Firms can combine phases, skip patterns or face several tensions at once; use evidence to test the model’s fit.
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Related templates.
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