Organizational Analysis through Group Processes: A Theoretical Perspective for Organization Development

Abstract

It is not coincidental that both the American and European traditions of organization development began in intellectual centers with profound dedication to the understanding of face-to-face groups. In America, Kurt Lewin and his students carried out some of the early social psychological research into small group behavior and founded the Research Center for Group Dynamics and the National Training Laboratories; and they contributed to the development of a framework for action research methodology which was followed by the first social science based intervention into an industrial organization (Marrow, 1969). In Europe the now widely practiced socio-technical perspective was developed at the Tavistock Institute, where W.R. Bion completed one of the first truly classical works on small group theory (Cummings and Srivastva, 1976).KeywordsActivity SpaceGroup ProcessGroup DevelopmentOrganizational AnalysisTask SpaceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.