Achieving structural integration is an important challenge facing all managers, requiring them to make decisions about how to coordinate relationships among the interdependent people and groups they manage. Mutual adjustment is coordination accomplished through person-to-person communication processes in which co-workers share job-related information. The simplest of the three basic coordination mechanisms, it consists of the exchange among co-workers of knowledge about how a job should be done and who should do it. Direct supervision, a second type of coordination mechanism, occurs when one person takes responsibility for the work of others. Mutual adjustment might also be employed on the assembly line to cope with machine breakdowns, power outages, or other temporary situations in which standard operating procedures are ineffective and direct supervision proves insufficient. The large initial costs of standardization can therefore be amortized – spread over long periods of time and across long production runs.
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