Greiner's Growth Curve
Version 1.0.0 · Updated 2026-07-30
CORE DEFINITION
Larry Greiner posits that organizational growth consists of alternating evolutionary periods (steady growth) and revolutionary periods (crises). The five crises are: leadership crisis, autonomy crisis, control crisis, bureaucracy crisis, and internal growth crisis.
SCAFFOLDING EFFECT
Reduce cognitive load
- Crisis anticipation: tells founders that organizational chaos is normal. Each step up (e.g., from 10 to 100 employees) inevitably triggers a specific crisis (e.g., the original brotherhood management fails, triggering a leadership crisis). This is not regression, but the pain of evolution.
Anchor fast decisions
Greiner proposed that organizational growth goes through several stages, each driven by alternating evolution (growth) and revolution (crisis), where crises force management transformation. Growth is inevitably accompanied by pain.
MINIMUM ACTION
In progress 0/3Practice this model in one real situation:
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Source support: Explicit
- hbr.orghttps://hbr.org/1998/05/evolution-and-revolution-as-organizations-growverified
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