THREE APPROACHES TO ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING

?? 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¡ª

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¡ªdata processing, budget and accounting techniques, salary administration¡ª

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.

The Pfeiffer Library Volume 16, 2nd Edition. Copyright ? 1998 Jossey-Bass/Pfeiffer

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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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The Pfeiffer Library Volume 16, 2nd Edition. Copyright ? 1998 Jossey-Bass/Pfeiffer

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 training¡úmanagement development¡úorganization

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¡ªmanagement training, management

development or organization development¡ªdepends, 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.

The Pfeiffer Library Volume 16, 2nd Edition. Copyright ? 1998 Jossey-Bass/Pfeiffer

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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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The Pfeiffer Library Volume 16, 2nd Edition. Copyright ? 1998 Jossey-Bass/Pfeiffer

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.

The Pfeiffer Library Volume 16, 2nd Edition. Copyright ? 1998 Jossey-Bass/Pfeiffer

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