An organization's division of labor and means of coordination shape the nature of interdependency or coupling among its workers (March &Olsen, 1976; Thompson, 1967; Weick, 1976). Because machine bureaucracies distribute and coordinate their work by rationalizing and formalizing it, their workers are highly dependent on one another and thus, like links in a chain, they are tightly coupled. However, specialization and professionalization create a loosely coupled form of interdependency in the professional bureaucracy, a situation in which workers are not highly dependent on one another. Because specialization requires close contact with the client and professionalization requires little overt coordination or communication among workers (everyone knows roughly what everyone else is doing by way of their common professionalization), each professional works closely with his or her clients and only loosely with other professionals (Weick, 1976, 1982).