Organizational development concepts and applications

Organization

What is an Organizational Theory?

In the organizational sciences (e.g., organizational behavior, organizational psychology), one of the more misunderstood terms is organizational theory. To some, organizational theory is a field of study; to others, it is the process of using metaphorical language to describe organizational processes (e.g., McKenna & Wright, 1992; Morgan, 1986), or it represents an attempt to determine the best way to organize work organizations. The term is used to indicate all of these things, but an organizational theory is really just a way of organizing purposeful human action. Given the diversity of purposeful human endeavors, there are numerous ways to organize them, and, hence, a great many organizational theories.

Major Organizational Theories

Having provided a brief overview of the field of organizational theory, we now move on to a consideration of the major organizational theories themselves. Organizational theories simply represent ideas or models of the form in which human activity can be organized. Obviously, there could be an almost infinite number of ideas about organizing human activity; however, over the years, three general types of organizational theories have been developed. These three types are described next.

Classical Organizational Theories

Historically, the term classical organizational theory has been used to denote models of organizing that were developed from approximately the early twentieth century until the mid-1940s. The best known of these classical theories were scientific management (Taylor, 1911), ideal bureaucracy (Weber, 1947), and administrative management (Fayol, 1984). Each is discussed briefly in the following paragraphs.

The term scientific management was first introduced in describing the history of organizational psychology (see Chapter 1) and was examined further in our discussion of job design (see Chapter 9). We resurrect this term yet again because it also has implications for the ways organizations are designed. As might be remembered from our earlier discussion, a fundamental principle of scientific management was that those who design the work should be separate from those who actually perform the work. The implications of this approach for organizing work are quite important. For example, it implies that there should be distinct status or hierarchical differences among employees. In Taylor's writings, it is fairly obvious that those who design the work occupy a higher status than those who perform it. An organization that is designed from a scientific management perspective thus has many levels and many ways to distinguish among those levels.

The term ideal bureaucracy may strike some as an oxymoron because the term bureaucracy is often used as a codeword for organizational inefficiency and administrative inflexibility. In reality ideal bureaucracy simply represents one idea or theory of how human activity should be organized. Most attribute the development of ideal bureaucracy to Max Weber, who is generally credited with being one of the pioneers of the macro side of organizational psychology. Weber, as you may recall, wore many intellectual hats and made contributions to history, economics, political science, and sociology during his lifetime. In Weber's time, there were few organizations in the form that we see them today. Instead, a great many "organizations" of his era were loosely run family businesses, or they consisted of an individual craftsman who worked independently. Given these organizational forms, there was not a great need for organizing, per se.