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| Figure 1. Systems image of organization. Dynamic environments create a requirement for more adaptive systems image of the organization and its functioning. |
Document created: 27 August 04
Air University Review, November-December
1970
The normal condition facing Air Force managers is change. Dealing with the new and unexpected has become routine, while the problem that can be solved in the same way as yesterday’s problem is the exception. The only certain prediction that can be made for the future is that rates of change will increase while permanence—in technologies, skills, jobs, organizational relationships, and missions—will decrease.
Most observant Air Force officers recognize that rapid change and increasing complexity are and will continue to be the dominant feature in the daily life of the Air Force officer. Since organizations must reflect the nature of the work they are performing, it is not surprising to find that the organizational relationships with which the Air Force leader must deal are also becoming increasingly complex and difficult to manage. This creates many problems common to all large, complex organizations, such as rapid proliferation of levels of review, unclear assignment of responsibility, geographical dispersal of operations, and the near impossibility of maintaining essential face-to-face, person-to-person communication.
Top management increasingly finds it necessary to raise key questions that have the most profound implications for the way the Air Force does business. Will major organizational changes be required to make full use of the computer as a management tool? How can managerial control be maintained over systems development and procurement? How many levels of review should there be for various Air Force activities? How can excessive review be avoided while still insuring coordination and necessary control? What are the implications of either centralizing or decentralizing functions such as base support facilities and research management? How can such centralization or decentralization best be accomplished? These are critical questions, increasingly difficult to answer because of the complexity of Air Force operations. Approaches to leadership and organization must be compatible with the task to be performed.
traditional vs. modern views of the organization
In the context of major change, often the methods of operation that proved effective with past problems rapidly become obsolete. The military organization of the past relied heavily on tradition, standard operating procedures, and clear lines of hierarchical authority for effective functioning. These are organizational characteristics that are well suited for operation with simple technologies in relatively stable environments. By contrast, an organization operating with complex technologies in an ever changing environment, as does the modern Air Force, must be geared to renewal, creative problem-solving, and highly flexible lateral communication and coordination. Recognition of inconsistencies between present practice and present need is stimulating a good deal of self-examination among more progressive Air Force leaders.
Much past thinking about Air Force organization has been heavily influenced by the conventional image that most managers have of the basic nature of an organization. The classic image of the organization consists of a number of boxes connected by lines, representing authority relationships from the top down. Within this classic perspective, a first concern in organizing is to break the work down into a series of units, each to be carried out according to standard procedures and policies through clear assignment of authority and responsibility to a specified group of individuals shown in a box on the chart. This view of the organization is basic to many of the classic principles of organization —unity of command, span of control, authority equal to responsibility, functional autonomy—principles which are outlined in Air Force Manual 26-2, Organization Policy and Guidance, and familiar to most Air Force officers.
Current research and experience highlight the fact that this approach to organization is dependent on a rather significant assumption: that the tasks to be performed by the organization are relatively simple and constant. An organization so structured may be well prepared to deal with the routine, but it is ill suited to deal with the unexpected problems that impact simultaneously on a number of different units of the organization and call for sophisticated and coordinated judgments in decision-making. The following are a few of the weaknesses often found in such classic organizations:
—Each functional department tends to put its own goals ahead of those of the larger organization.
—No group feels responsible for integrating the functional activities.
—Lower-level experience does not develop the point of view and skills required to develop general managers.
—The emphasis is on vertical relations, neglecting the fact that the middle manager’s activities and relationships are primarily lateral.
—Other management processes, such as planning and control, are fragmented.
—Cross-functional understanding and communication are discouraged and functional conflicts are encouraged.
—Self-perpetuation of functional activities and resistance to change are encouraged.
—Problems of integration result,
causing top management to direct its attention almost exclusively to internal
relations while neglecting the organization’s relations to its enviroment.1
This modern world requires a more dynamic systems view of the organization as an interaction between people and technology, linked by organizational structure and information flows and engaged in continual exchange with an ever changing environment. The nature of the interaction between people, technology, organizational structure, and environment determines the effectiveness and efficiency with which the organization fulfills its mission. (Figure 1)
Figure 1. Systems image of organization. Dynamic environments create a requirement for more adaptive systems image of the organization and its functioning.
The organizational system has many parallels to a biological system with its highly complex and interrelated flows and regulatory systems. The same criteria of health or sickness normally applied to a plant or an animal can also be applied to organizations. The organizational system that is vital, regenerating, efficient, adaptable, continually growing in capability, and in touch with and realistically responsive to its environment may be characterized as healthy. An organization is basically sick if it is rigid, unresponsive, and tired; if it suffers from loss of ability to function and tends to lose contact with its environment and become unresponsive to it.
Insuring the healthy, self-renewing functioning of the Air Force is one of the most important responsibilities of top-level Air Force managers. It is impossible to prepare and plan specifically for every possible future contingency. It is, however, possible to build an organization that will be maximally flexible and adaptive in dealing with a very wide range of contingencies.
Designing and maintaining organizational self-renewal requires both self-renewing organizational structures and self-renewing leadership. The technologies necessary both to design self-renewing organizations and to develop self-renewing leaders are already available through developments in the behavioral and social sciences, though their application remains somewhat limited.
Organizations change because their environments change. Before we look in more detail at the nature of the new technologies available for organizational self-renewal, a review of some of the more important environmental changes facing the Air Force will help place the discussion in clearer perspective. In thinking of the Air Force as a system interacting with its environment, one can see the Air Force as dependent upon resources provided by the environment, in return for which the environment requires certain mission outputs.2 Both inputs and outputs are in constant change, thus requiring constant change in Air Force operating and support systems.
For example, the people who are the human resource inputs to the Air Force are the products of a rapidly evolving social climate. Thus these inputs are changed in very significant ways.3 Present recruits are better educated and more inclined to question convention than were their predecessors. They are not willing to follow orders blindly and accept tradition or Air Force convenience as acceptable reasons for trivial work or arbitrary rules. Money and conventional patriotism have less appeal for today’s top graduates. Implementation of an all-volunteer force may remove the draft as a recruitment incentive. The implications of these changes for the Air Force organizational system are quite clear. Rather than rely on the environment to send people into the system, the Air Force must win and hold top talent by maintaining an attractive organizational climate and by providing jobs that are challenging and meaningful within the context of modern values.
Canada offers a potentially instructive lesson. There is indication that the combination of a volunteer force, antimilitary sentiment in the press, and an affluent economy has had an impact on retention that is seriously detrimental to Canada’s armed forces. According to figures reported by Lieutenant General E. M. Reyno, Vice Chief of the Canadian Defense Staff,4 these retention problems have become so severe that between 1958 and 1968 manpower costs increased from 41 percent of the Canadian defense budget to 67 percent. This has forced a reduction in outlays for equipment and facility replacement down to 13 percent of the budget and resulted in cancellation of operational exercises and unit moves.
In the United States, growing racial tensions have carried over into the military and created a threat to command structure. Spurred by directives from Secretary of Defense Melvin R. Laird, many constructive actions are being taken throughout the military forces to promote racial harmony. Some experts believe, however, that many tensions such as those experienced by the military result not so much from racial sensitivities as from a more general resentment among those without power against arbitrary and dehumanizing rules, discipline, and conditions over which they have no control. Thus the implications of present racial tensions in the military may reach further than many people presently recognize.
Another important change affecting the Air Force is the strong effort on the part of Congress to reduce the input of money and manpower into military applications, while requiring that the output of national security remain at least constant. The Air Force can be responsive to this demand only through more effective organization. It may mean greater flexibility in the use of resources. It may mean elimination of nonessential functions. It may mean a general shifting away from labor-intensive work methods, including implementation of wholly new concepts of organization based on full exploitation of modern information-processing technology.
Other critical changes in both the input and output of the system are creating marked changes in the types of skills required to operate the internal organization system. For example, increasingly sophisticated technology has resulted in an organization in which the need for the traditional combat hero is less central to effective performance than the need for technology managers who are aware of operational needs. Only about six percent of Air Force active duty personnel are actually assigned to weapons application units. Yet Air Force organization and policies apparently remain geared primarily to the combat hero (as will be discussed later in greater detail). Further, in a dynamic changing world, new knowledge about the possibilities of the future is becoming increasingly more valuable than experience with solutions that were adequate for the problems of the past. Yet present personnel policies almost exclusively reward experience over ability, education, and performance, and some senior officers continue to feel that the talented young man who gets impatient with the strict seniority system is simply not proper Air Force career material.
Changes in the types of missions the Air Force performs are significant well beyond the change in the technologies involved. Many times it is the basic concepts of warfare that must change. For example, knowledge of conventional combat tactics must be increasingly supplemented with knowledge of sophisticated nuclear deterrent strategies and the psychological subtleties of political warfare. Present reward systems reflect little recognition of the growing importance of these skills.
Such changes, along with significant changes in technology, reflect developments that may force a revolution in defense management and organization and create the need for serious focus on the needs for organizational self-renewal. A few of the changes called for by this revolution may be reduction of levels in the hierarchy, implementation of systems management with reduced reliance on formal functional authority, organization around information systems, widespread elimination of routine jobs, changes in the kinds of skills most highly valued and rewarded, upgrading of responsibility, and a greater concern for the individual in personnel policies.
designing the organization for self-renewal
Self-renewing organizations must be designed to accomplish the following:
· Facilitate rather than restrict flexible reallocation of resources.
· Develop and reward creative, innovative, self-renewing individuals over reliable, consistent, disciplined, and tradition-oriented individuals.
· Insure the flow of new information into the organization from its environment and remove barriers that isolate the organization from new information.
· Develop a change-oriented concept of mission and organizational identity, rather than a mission concept that focuses on a highly specific output and an organizational identity that emphasizes tradition.
· Stimulate new ideas and facilitate change by minimizing controlling mechanisms and levels of review and by making sure that authority exists to approve and implement new ideas at the appropriate levels in the organization.
· Encourage the free flow of information throughout the organization and avoid the restriction of information flow to clearly defined channels.
· Reward intelligent risk-taking performance more than strict adherence to rigid procedures.
· Minimize formal rules and reporting procedures and increase reliance on self-control relative to formal control systems.
All the above operating procedures can be accomplished by conscious and purposeful design choices and managerial actions. The result is generally an organization that is not only more effective and adaptive in dealing with change but also more satisfying and stimulating to its members. Such an organization finds it relatively easy to attract and retain creative, high-level talent.
A detailed treatment of organizational design techniques is beyond the scope of this article; however, a brief treatment of some key concepts, such as differentiation and integration, may be useful in demonstrating those integral relationships between the organization and its environment with which the designer must be prepared to deal.5
differentiation
For some years the task of differentiating the organization was looked on as
one of dividing the work to be done into areas of responsibility and assigning
them to individual offices related to each other by lines of authority as shown
on an organization chart. Paul Lawrence and Jay Lorsch, in their research at
the Harvard Graduate School of Business, are finding, however, that the task of
differentiation is much more complex than this. In the most effective
organization, offices are differentiated not only with regard to the
responsibilities assigned to them but also in terms of time perspective, goal
orientation, formal structure, and interpersonal styles. The more dynamic the
environment, the more differentiated the organization must be in these terms to
be optimally effective.6
The basic findings developed by Lawrence and Lorsch can be readily related to the Air Force. The personnel system within the Air Force has characteristically recognized three basic career categories: operations, administrative, and research and engineering. These categories reflect the three basic activities essential to carrying out the work of the Air Force as well as the corresponding career orientations.
Figure 2 suggests some of the implications of organizational differentiation for the operating levels of the Air Force; reality is, of course, much more complex and perhaps less extreme.
Figure 2. Differentiation and Air Force environment. Each of the different environments in which the Air Force operates has very different characteristics, which in turn require distinctly different approaches to organization for task performance.
The column labeled “Operations” refers to the combat arm of the Air Force, and the relevant environment for operations activities is combat. Within this environment, time perspective tends to be very short. When a pilot is flying a mission, the relevant time frame may be measured in minutes or even seconds. The feedback on his performance is often instantaneous and final. The result is that the operations organization must be geared to instantaneous response. It must be extremely flexible and contingency-oriented. Within this context, in part because of the short time frame and in part because of the finality of the results, the overriding goal must be effectiveness. Neither cost nor efficiency is a relevant consideration in a life-or-death situation. Time and circumstances do not allow time to think the problem through to a solution that is best or most productive. An immediate and adequate solution, though not necessarily the best, must suffice. Simple adherence to standard procedures may be necessary.
Within the administrative function, a more intermediate time perspective is generally appropriate. Split-second action is rarely relevant to the administrator’s job. Very tight time constraints on occasion may involve a time span of a few hours, more likely a few days. The general operating perspective of the administrator is more ideally in a time frame of months or the one-year budget cycle. The feedback on the success of his efforts may frequently cover a time frame anywhere from a year to perhaps five years. Much of the administrator’s concern is with the attempt to develop efficiency within his operation. The economic use of resources and the smooth flow of work with minimum abnormal disruption are often appropriate concerns. Even where there is concern for creativity and change, it is normally desirable that the routine work be accomplished on a smooth, efficient basis.
Within the research and engineering environment, a much longer-range time perspective is usually appropriate. On the basic research end of the research spectrum, the time perspective may be as long as five to ten years. Very rarely is a research effort, if worthy of the name, concerned with a time frame of less than six months to a year. Research by its very nature deals with innovation, and the goal is generally in terms of a best or most creative solution. The longer time perspective is needed to provide the flexibility and the time for experimentation and search for a best or most creative idea. If a project is properly organized and is a true research activity, the allowable amount of operating routine is minimal. This makes conventional concepts of efficiency somewhat difficult to apply.
Consistent with the differences in the nature of the work and the types of environment of the three areas, the appropriate basis of formal authority also varies in each area. Within the operations area, formal authority is generally invested in rank. Given the need for immediate response to orders under adverse circumstances and the high likelihood of members of the command structure being incapacitated without warning, a clear visible, and unambiguous authority structure is probably necessary. The use of clear, visible rank serves a useful function within this context. If one individual becomes incapacitated, it is immediately clear who is next in charge.
Within the administrative functions, formal authority is ordinarily vested in office. A given individual has his authority because he is the Director of Personnel or the Director of Manpower or the Director of Operations. Thus, his authority is defined not only in terms of a level of authority in the organization but also in terms of a functional area of responsibility. Normally his formal authority does not extend beyond the range of his functional assignment. When the authority of rank is superimposed on the authority of office, this distinction sometimes becomes confused and may interfere with the rational functioning of the administrative structure.
In dealing with research and engineering, the critical questions are generally of a technical rather than an administrative or operational nature. Neither formal rank nor office is especially relevant. The man with the greatest recognized, specialized, technical competence relevant to the problem is accepted as the authority, and authority may shift freely from one individual to another based on the nature of the problems at hand. Free and open participation is usually the best way to define and evaluate solutions to research problems. Deference to formal rank can seriously interfere with this process and impair effective decision-making.
The same types of concepts apply to vertical differentiation of the organization as apply to the horizontal differentiation. It is generally appropriate for managers or commanders at lower levels of the organization to have a relatively shorter time perspective. Less breadth of view is required. Especially in administrative tasks, many of the decisions are routine and can be made according to established rules or precedents. Decisions at higher levels are seldom routine; they require more analysis and much greater personal judgment. Less time is devoted to operational control at higher levels, while increasingly greater time is devoted to planning. Higher-level management must give more attention to the organization’s relations with its external environment. Middle management personnel must be skilled in coordination and in maintaining lateral liaisons throughout the organization.
The major point of this discussion of differentiation is that the organization must be appropriate to the work being performed in order to achieve optimum productivity. This means there are no universal principles of organization that apply in all contexts. The more complex and dynamic the environment, the more differentiated the organization must be to achieve optimal performance.
integration
Providing for appropriate differentiation in the organization does not in itself guarantee effective performance. It is also necessary to provide effective mechanisms for integrating or coordinating activities between the subelements of the organization. Though given little explicit recognition in conventional organization charts or manuals, the significant work of the organization takes place in the form of flows.7 These include flows of people, information, money, materials, and capital equipment. The fact that different managers are acting on different parts of the same flow, or on flows which intersect at some point in time, creates the need for coordination between their activities. Effective organizational performance requires that all flows be kept in balance with one another.
The more sharply the organization is differentiated, the greater become the problems of communication between subunits and, of course, the more difficult the task of integration. This is of significant current interest to organizational designers.
There are many trade-offs involved in organizational design decisions. This
is especially evident in dealing with the problem of integration. For example,
there are at least three basic ways to achieve integration or coordination in
an organization, each with its own advantages and limitations.8
1. By the use of standardized rules and procedures to coordinate actions. This is the traditional approach. The shared superior is responsible for resolving disputes between subordinate units. Where flows are stable and the need for innovation is limited, this can be the most effective and efficient mechanism for integration.
2. By the use of an information system to provide coordination. A classic example is the airline reservation system whereby the activities of hundreds or even thousands of individuals are coordinated through interaction with a central computer. This is very useful where the information involved readily lends itself to computer processing.
3. By the use of interaction among people as the primary coordinating device. This may involve committees, task forces, or assignments of individual integrator roles whereby one individual is responsible for communication among many activities for exchange of information and for coordination. Use of interpersonal mechanisms for integration is the most flexible and adaptive option, but it may also be less reliable.
As the need for organizational responsiveness to change increases, relatively greater reliance must be placed on information systems and the use of integrator roles to provide for needed lateral coordination. Both require a fresh look at the way organizations are designed.
Greater reliance on information systems to provide for coordination means that information systems, rather than formal lines of authority, become the most critical element in the design of the organization. Thus an organization designed around an information system may be more effective than one designed around reporting relationships and functional groupings.
When integrator roles are used for coordination, it becomes immediately
important to distinguish between two different types of leadership roles
requiring somewhat different types of skills and organization. These are the
functional manager roles and the integrator manager roles. One specializes in
management of functions, the other specializes in the integration of functional
activities. Functional roles, as discussed earlier, should be differentiated in
terms of the time perspectives, goal orientations, formal structure, and
interpersonal styles involved. An effective functional manager adapts the style
and point of view appropriate to his function; he may be relatively
specialized. In contrast, the effective integrator must have especially
well-developed interpersonal skills and must assume a perspective and style
that strikes a balance between the extremes of the members of the functional
activities he is integrating, i.e., he must be able to “speak the language” of
each group of specialists. The integrator must carefully avoid a
specialized functional orientation.9
implications for leadership and career development
The foregoing concepts have many practical implications for Air Force managers, both in a somewhat personal sense and in making broader policy decisions relating to organizational design.
The need for differentiation in leadership styles requires that each Air Force leader continually examine his own leadership style in the context of the type of work he is managing. For the individual leader, sensitivity to the demands of the situation and flexibility to adapt his own leadership style to these demands should be a constant goal in self-development. Likewise, it is important that the Air Force review the content of its leadership training programs. Research in industry suggests that the same leadership training course may improve the performance of one manager while detracting from the performance of another, depending on whether the styles taught are appropriate to the predominant style of the organization to which the man is assigned.10 This means that training in command styles of leadership may be detrimental to a man assigned in a participatively managed R&D unit but helpful to a man in some other unit. It is important that this be considered in the design of leadership training efforts and in the programming of officers for training.
Both the individual and the organization must be conscious of the different needs of functional manager roles and integrator manager roles. They require different points of view and different skills. Assignment rotation between functional roles without appropriate orientation to the different leadership demands of the function may create only confusion and impairment of performance rather than the intended career broadening experience. The desired broadening of perspective sought as preparation for high-level management responsibility is most effectively provided through assignment to integrator roles where the requirement for cross-functional perspective is inherent in the job. Likewise it should be recognized that one individual may be well suited to career progression within a given functional area, yet not have the potential for effective performance in roles that require the integration of functions.
responsibility for organizational design
Many different organizations within the Air Force have responsibility for making design decisions relating to organizational structures, information systems, and policies concerning management, personnel, and training. Though it should be clear from this discussion that these decisions are closely interrelated, this interdependence is in reality often neglected. Indeed, no mechanisms presently exist for stimulating a coordinated attack on the questions and problems that are most significant in insuring continued organizational self-renewal in the Air Force.
There is significant need here for assignment of integrator role responsibility to facilitate joint discussion and decision-making on questions such as “How can organizational structures be redesigned to make optimal use of advanced information processing and communication technologies?” These efforts must be supported by research aimed at improving the technologies available for dealing with organizational design questions and adapting them to specific Air Force needs.
Maintaining a capacity for renewal requires the continual availability to
Air Force managers of data relating to the health of the organizations which
they are managing. An information system which provides for continual gathering
and reporting of data on the motivation, utilization, and retention of Air
Force personnel can provide quite powerful indicators of organizational health
and assist in the identification of trouble spots. Such information is
of critical importance to organizational designers. Researchers at the
University of Michigan are making progress in the design and development of
such systems.11
preparing the “new managers”
The problems of preparing men to manage dynamic, change-oriented organizations are much more difficult than training men for more conventional roles. On 9 July 1969 Under Secretary of the Air Force John McLucas addressed a memorandum to the Assistant Secretaries of the Air Force which contained the following statement:
I am concerned with the degree to which the Air Force is now prepared to ensure that the right kind of people will be available to meet the requirements of the new management techniques. We must carefully examine our assignment and training procedures to identify those with the skills and aptitudes necessary for increased managerial responsibilities, to train them for the demanding positions and then to retain and develop them for even heavier responsibilities.
The “new management techniques” combine skills in the use of sophisticated
information and decision-making technologies with advanced skills in group
dynamics and interpersonal relations. According to Business Week the new
management is “bringing a new breed of manager into the executive suite and
giving the old managers a new outlook. In company after company, it’s also
shattering the old organization charts.”12
The new management is geared to change and requires men who have the skills, values, and self-confidence that are required to manage change and to seek continual self-renewal. These skills and values must be built into the organization through intensive and carefully planned development programs. Such development programs can be of two types—those which focus on developing individuals and those which focus on developing work groups or teams. For the development of individuals, the Air Force has one of the world’s strongest “in-company” educational systems in the Air Force Academy and Air University. Working groups from the various schools now meet regularly to insure that current programs are geared to providing self-renewing leaders skilled in the new management techniques.
However, as important as individual leadership may be, experience indicates that organizational change and improvement require the training and development of teams as well as individuals. An individual committed to the new management will only become frustrated and create conflict if he is assigned to a group comprised of individuals still operating with the skills and assumptions of traditional management. Thus industry is increasingly turning to the use of organizational development programs to supplement more conventional management development efforts. This approach involves training work groups as teams. Rather than dealing with abstract problems in a classroom, the trainer or consultant works with the group to develop its skills through working on the problems which the team daily faces in carrying out its mission. Special emphasis is placed on developing skills in goal setting and communication and on resolving interpersonal and interdepartmental conflicts which inevitably result from complexity and change and which may interfere with effective performance.
The new techniques have been pioneered by several space-age companies. Their
success is attested to by the rapidly spreading use of team or organizational
development techniques throughout industry. The Air Force might well benefit
from the creation of an internal organizational development capability as an
important part of its long-range self-renewal effort.13
Preparing for change and assisting in the search for organizational self-renewal are key responsibilities of every member of the Air Force. New concepts of organizational design, new techniques for organizational analysis, and new methods for the development of leadership skills provide potentials that were not previously available. It is becoming clear that conflict between needs for personal self-realization and needs for organizational performance and flexibility is unnecessary. The well-designed organization can be self-renewing and productive and at the same time provide a satisfying work environment in which its members can grow and make full use of their individual abilities. Developing such an organization is no simple task—it requires substantial and continued commitment on the part of Air Force leadership.
Harvard Graduate School of Business
Administration
Notes
1. This list is adapted from Howard M. Carlisle, “Are Functional Organizations Becoming Obsolete?” Management Review, January 1969, pp. 2-9.
2. For further elaboration of this concept relating inputs to environmental demands, see David Easton’s “A Systems Analysis of Political Life,” in Walter Buckley, ed., Modern Systems Research for the Behavioral Scientist (Chicago: Aldine, 1968), pp. 428-36.
3. Lt. Col. Robert H. Drumm has examined these changes in “Managing the Managers of Tomorrow,” Personnel, November-December 1969, pp. 55-60, and in “Armed Forces Managers in a New Era,” Military Review, November 1969, pp. 72-79.
4. Letter to Lieutenant General John W. Carpenter III, 31 January 1969.
5. In addition to the other references cited in this article, the reader who desires a more detailed treatment of organizational design concepts may wish to consult the following: Jay Lorsch and Paul R. Lawrence, eds., Studies in Organization Design (Homewood, Illinois: Irwin, 1970); Paul R. Lawrence and Jay W. Lorsch, Developing Organizations (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1969); and James D. Thompson, Organizations in Action (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967).
6. Paul R. Lawrence and Jay W. Lorsch, Organization and Environment: Managing Differentiation and Integration (Boston: Division of Research, Graduate School of Business Administration, Harvard University, 1967).
7. Jay W. Forrester, Industrial Dynamics (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1961); and Leonard Sayles, Managerial Behavior Administration in Complex Organizations (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964).
8. The alternative methods for achieving integration in an organization have been treated in much greater detail by Jay Galbraith in “Program Management,” working paper, Sloan School of Management, M. I. T., Cambridge, Massachusetts, December 1968.
9. Paul R. Lawrence and Jay W. Lorsch, “New Management Job: The Integrator,” Harvard Business Review, 45, November-December 1967, pp. 142-51.
10. John B. Miner, “Innovations in Management Education for Intermediate Students—Continuing Education Programs,” paper presented to the Eastern Academy of Management, Washington, D.C., 29 March 1969.
11. Rensis Likert and David G. Bowers, “Organizational Theory and Human Resource Accounting,” American Psychologist, vol. 24, June 1969, pp. 585-92.
12. “The ‘New Management’ Finally Takes Over,” 23 August 1969, pp. 58-62.
13. The following sources provide more details on organizational development programs and how they are implemented: Sheldon A. Davis, “An Organic Problem Solving Method of Organizational Change,” The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, vol. 3, 1967, pp. 3-21; Richard Beckhard, “The Confrontation Meeting,” Harvard Business Review, 45, March-April 1967, pp. 149-55; Richard Beckhard, Organization Development: Strategies and Models (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1969); and Edgar H. Schein, Process Consultation: Its Role in Organization Development (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1969).
David C. Korten (Ph.D., Stanford University) is a Visiting Associate Professor, Harvard Business School, and Academic Director of the MBA Program, INCAE, Managua, Nicaragua. As an Air Force officer, he worked in behavioral sciences for ARPA and DDR&E and lectured at the Special Air Warfare School. Dr. Korten was a Fulbright lecturer in Ethiopia for three years, helping to establish a college of business administration there.
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this
document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression,
academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official
position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air
Force or the Air University.
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