THREE APPROACHES TO ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING

[Pages:645] THREE APPROACHES TO ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING

Anthony J. Reilly

"I do OD." "We're into OD in our organization." The term Organization Development, or "OD" as it is popularly called, has become part of the applied behavioral science jargon. In some instances it is confused with other terms, such as management training or management development. Although there is some overlap, both conceptually and operationally, among the terms, there are real differences as well. The attempt here is to show how the three terms complement one another on the one hand and how they differ on the other.

An implicit expectation of any kind of management enrichment program is that of learning, which generally involves some relatively permanent type of change-- behavioral, attitudinal, or cognitive. Therefore, the different kinds of learning are of particular interest to us in this paper.

MANAGEMENT TRAINING

When I think of "training," I think of one kind of learning. Training conveys to me the idea of making people more alike than different in some respect and trying to deemphasize individual differences in some particular area. For example, a number of persons are trained to operate a complicated piece of equipment. Once the equipment is designed and built, hopefully to the specifications that optimize a person's ability to operate the machine, training programs are implemented in order that the operator may "fit" himself or herself to the machine. Individual differences among people in terms of how they operate the machine may cut down on the machines' efficiency. Time-andmotion studies represent another approach where training may be utilized to make people respond to a set behavioral pattern. What about management training? Many organizations spend considerable time, energy, and dollars to make their managers more alike than different. Instilling company values and philosophy and inculcating the organization's climate and norms are examples of exposing managers to ideas and ideals they are expected to emulate and to think similarly about. Training managers in specific skill areas--data processing, budget and accounting techniques, salary administration-- are other examples of applications of management training.

Originally published in The 1973 Annual Handbook for Group Facilitators by John E. Jones and J. William Pfeiffer (Eds.), San Diego, CA: Pfeiffer & Company.

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MANAGEMENT DEVELOPMENT

Whereas management training attempts to level out individual differences, management development provides a different kind of learning opportunity. To me, development means legitimizing individual differences, providing opportunities for the person to actualize his or her own potential, and encouraging managers to be more different than they are alike along certain dimensions. As with training, numerous organizations invest extensively into management development programs. Examples of management development include the following: career testing and counseling programs, in which the person receives feedback based on test results about his or her abilities, interests, and personality; university programs geared towards a continuing education experience for the person, such as new ideas about management and advanced technological advances the manager needs to know about; and personal growth experiences, in which the person comes to an increased awareness and understanding of himself or herself and how he or she affects other people. Each of these provides an experience aimed at developing the individual's unique potential. The focal point is on self-development. The assumption made here is that increased self-awareness and understanding can lead to attitudinal or behavioral changes that will increase an individual's personal effectiveness and ultimately the effectiveness of the organization.

ORGANIZATION DEVELOPMENT

Conceptually, organization development is different from both management training and management development. The latter two kinds of learning may, however, be part of an OD effort. Burke (1971) stated that "although persons may be involved in events that are properly labeled as OD technology (some of the examples mentioned above), such activities are not considered organizational development if they are not part of a planned effort at changing the organization's culture." In short, OD can be defined as a planned process of cultural change utilizing behavioral science knowledge as a base for interventions aimed at increasing the organization's health and effectiveness (Beckhard, 1969). As such, its focus is not solely on the individual person and his or her growth in the organization. Rather, the focus is on how the individual relates to his or her own work group and how his or her group interfaces with other groups in the organization. Again, to use Burke's words: "The primary reason for using OD is a need to improve some or all of the system that constitutes the total organization."

Such a planned process demands careful assessment or diagnosis of what is needed to increase overall effectiveness, along with tailor-made changes or interventions, the goals of which are to satisfy those felt needs. The key concern of behavioral science practitioners involved in OD work is, of course, to create the kind of organizational climate wherein individuals meet their own needs and, at the same time, optimize the realization of organizational goals. Team-building, learning how to diagnose needs, working through task and interpersonal issues, creating structural and functional changes to facilitate effectiveness are some examples that may be part of an OD effort.

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These three approaches to organization growth are certainly not mutually exclusive. Rather, each is complementary to the other. Often one phase evolves rather naturally into another. However, the evaluation has a definite sequence. Generally, the pattern follows one of management trainingmanagement developmentorganization development. For example, before effective intergroup work (part of an OD sequence) is done, it is of great importance that team-building within each group be conducted.

The choice of learning approach employed--management training, management development or organization development--depends, therefore, on the specific kind of change desired in the organization. Whether the change be directed at reducing individual differences, legitimizing individual differences, or enhancing group/intergroup collaboration, performance is the key issue.

REFERENCES

Beckhard, R. (1969). Organization development: Its nature, origin, and prospects. Reading, MA: AddisonWesley.

Burke, W.W. (1971). A comparison of management development and organization development. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 5.

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 DIMENSIONS OF THE ORGANIZATIONAL UNIVERSE: A MODEL FOR ASSESSMENT AND DIRECTION

David J. Marion

Many approaches and technologies have been devised for assessing, managing, and developing organizations. Now available is a more sophisticated and varied set of alternatives for understanding and directing organizational behavior than ever before. The very complexity of this arsenal, however, renders it more a maze than a repertoire of choices. Lacking an adequate frame of reference, such a situation tends to produce confusion and poor choices. This essay presents a paradigm to order this array in terms of basic dimensions of organizational life. This model is keyed to the view that human systems are preeminently knowledge-producing and knowledge-utilizing systems.

STATE OF THE ART

The proliferation of theories, approaches, schemes, and models for understanding and affecting organizations is a natural and laudable consequence of success in basic research and in applied development efforts. Not unlike what has occurred in medicine and other highly technical fields, however, this has resulted in an information overload. A second cause of this proliferation of models and methods is that, unlike medicine's development of new ways to deal with problems that have always existed, the organizational, interpersonal, and intrapersonal arts and sciences must produce new approaches to new problems.

Individuals, their relationships, and their organizations exist in, contribute to, and partake of a new world. In the broadest terms, this new world may be characterized by unprecedented rates of change, magnitudes of size, degrees of complexity, explosions of information, implosions of space and time, and interpenetration and pervasiveness of systems. In such a world, traditional and unexamined forms of organizational functioning have become progressively less satisfactory. Thus new innovations have arisen, some of them directly out of scientific exploration of the organizational universe. If traditional ways are marked by their stable and unexamined nature, the contrasting hallmarks of science are change and explicit inquiry. Deliberate, thoughtful experimentation has led to such techniques and approaches as PPBS (Planning Programming Budgeting System), participatory management, PERT (Program

Originally published in The 1975 Annual Handbook for Group Facilitators by John E. Jones and J. William Pfeiffer (Eds.), San Diego, CA: Pfeiffer & Company. This paper has benefitted from discussion of earlier versions with Francis J. Pilecki, Kenneth Benne, and Joe Krzys, and from collaborative practice with John Ingalls.

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Evaluation and Review Techniques), performance contracting, grid analysis, MBO (Management By Objectives), sensitivity training, etc.

However, these techniques and approaches are more the administrator's puzzle than repertoire. In many ways the choices resemble those to be made in a modern supermarket: tremendous variety, competing products within each category, distinctively different and attractive packaging of similar commodities, and seemingly sincere testimonials by experts and users as to the goodness of particular products and producers. The modern manager/administrator has reason to feel that he or she is in a situation similar to that of the supermarket shopper. Varieties of approaches to organizational life are abundant, but there is little in the way of basic concepts that can guide our actions.

Intelligent selection, sequencing, and combining of techniques and methods of organizational assessment and direction are not possible unless there is an adequate frame of reference. This essay attempts to provide the manager with such a frame of reference. It presents a model of the organizational realm that can serve as a guide to organizational diagnosis and as a matrix for evaluating and selecting the techniques and approaches best suited to the solution of identified problems and concerns. This double purpose dictates the nature of the model to be developed.

In order to provide a general orientation for assessing organizational situations, the various ways of characterizing and describing such situations must be synthesized along basic dimensions. Reciprocally, in order to provide guidance in managing organizational situations, these basic dimensions must be analyzed and exposed.

THE ORGANIZATIONAL UNIVERSE

It often seems that organizational "solutions" (i.e., methods of assessment, management, development, etc.) are less than effective because of the complex and often confusing nature of organizational problems. Organizational life does not present itself to us in the shape of clearly delimited and defined problems. Indeed, the nature of problems in this domain is itself often problematic.

Organizations are some of the most complex sets of phenomena in the universe. Organizations not only have a multitude of parts and pieces and relationships, but a multitude of kinds of parts and pieces and relationships. Human organizations are made up of people, finances, places, understandings, inputs, groups, rewards, inventories, leaders, budgets, expectations, followers, regulations, outputs, salaries, incidents, tables of organization, histories, costs, communication, space, materials, authority, information, processes, tasks, choices, personnel, routine, morale, decisions, forms, motives, and many more components.

Every person has an implicit sense of how things work in his or her organization. But when it comes to conceptualizing organizations in ways that help to understand, to predict, and to affect them (diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment), we are still at a very primitive stage.

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A great deal more is known about the universe of the atom and of the solar system than about the universe of human organizations. For instance, it is known that the basic dimensions of atoms are mass, charge, and quantum level. In terms of these dimensions, the optical, electromagnetic, chemical, and other properties of various atoms can be described. In this way, the properties of the atom can be understood, predicted, and, in a growing number of instances, used for human purposes. We can begin to do the same in the universe of human organizations.

THE MODEL: SOME BASIC DIMENSIONS

The name of the model, Human System Development, identifies the three basic dimensions of the universe of human organizations (see Figure 1). All organizations have human energies, system dynamics, and developmental process.

Figure 1. Human System Development Model

These things are no more a tangible part of our direct experience than are mass, charge, and quantum levels. However, just as the properties of atoms reflect the way in which these basic dimensions are embodied, so can the ways, histories, and prospects of organizations be understood by the way in which they embody (1) human energies, (2) system dynamics, and (3) developmental process.

Human Energies

Human energies, which make an organization function, can be viewed as needs, interests, and values. In a sense, these energies are the fuel that fires the engine. If that is all they are, however, people are being exploited. Human needs, interests, and values deserve a significant degree of fulfillment. Unless an organization provides its members with a minimum of such fulfillment, it ultimately will founder.

In more traditional terms, human energies can be seen as knowledge, attitudes, and behavior. This is the familiar mapping of human activity into the cognitive, the affective, and the conative domains.

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The two approaches are certainly compatible (see Figure 2). Needs, interests, and values influence behavior, attitudes, and understandings. Reciprocally, needs, interests, and values consist of particular configurations of behavior, attitudes, and understandings. Both sets of terms provide a most comprehensive framework to examine a person's or a group's current status and future direction. For instance, does a person or a group want to do something (interest or need) but lack the skills (behavior) and concepts (knowledge) necessary for doing it, or vice versa? Does a person or a group understand the need for action but still hesitate to do it because personal (group) values conflict with that action? (As Samuel Johnson said, "A man may be convinced but not pleased against his will.")

Figure 2. Human Energies

There are any number of ways that each subdimension can be applied in greater detail. For instance, Abraham Maslow (1970) conceives of needs as a hierarchy that builds from basic needs for survival and safety through the needs for love, for esteem, and ultimately to the need for self-actualization.

A final word about human energies is that, like the other dimensions of the Human System Development model, they must be viewed as having, or existing on, multiple levels. At the least, human energies are organized at individual, group, institutional, and community levels. Usually a system's thrust--its tendencies and tensions--is discovered when the shape of human energies is determined at more than one level. For instance, as individual needs are recognized to meet, overlap, conflict, or compete with group needs, the basis for action that satisfies both sets of needs begins to be defined. As institutional action undermines, neglects, sympathizes with, or supports the efforts of an individual, a group, or a community, individual-institutional, group-institutional, or community-institutional transactions take shape.

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It is clear that in considering organizational functioning, the components and contexts with which the organization interacts must be taken into account. Organizations live through interaction. Without it, an organization is not truly alive and will soon perish.

System Dynamics

Organizations, of course, cannot be fully seen in terms only of human energies. Attention must also be given to system dynamics--the second basic dimension of our model (see Figure 3). From this perspective on organizational life, the structure, the functions, and the processes of the organization can be examined.

Figure 3. System Dynamics

Organizational structure includes such things as fiscal parameters and controls (e.g., the budget, profit-and-loss statement, debt service, external audits, taxes), the table of organization, the articles of incorporation, the plant and/or other real property, personnel and personnel policies, and the organization's legal status and obligations. Organizational structure is both a reflection and a determinant of the organization's functions. Indeed, the appropriateness, or fit, between the formal and informal structure of the organization and the functions that particular components and the organization as a whole are called on to provide, is a most critical matter.

Organizational function refers to the various outputs or outcomes of the organization's activities: the products, services, benefits, and effects of organizational life. Useful categories for assessing this domain are productivity, integration, organizational health, and feedback.1

Productivity is concerned with the defining tasks of the organization--what it does for a living--whether this is teaching children how to read, manufacturing can openers,

1 These categories and the related discussion follow Immegart and Pilecki (1973).

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