Healthy Organizations Research Articles

An Organization's Choice to Die; An Anthropological Case Study of Cultural Change.

Given an initial, participative and healthy organization, a corporation's employees refuse to adapt to unwelcomed values, decision making processes and technical input. A change in attitudes (especially in light of previously established expectations) is reflected in measurable shifts in behavior.

The paradoxical results of corporate conflict

The prevailing view of modern theorists is that conflict is increasingly perceived as legitimate, inevitable, and even desirable under certain organizational and environmental conditions. Katz claims that without conflict a company would have few problems, hardly any stimulation, and little incentive for constructive effort. In fact, the organization would soon see its own dissolution! If this is true, then a dynamic and healthy organization must be in a state of continuous conflict of varying degrees. The purpose of this paper is to examine the constructive and destructive consequences of that organizational conflict.

Organisation behaviour

In the first article in this series Pat Terry showed that current organisation theory is very much concerned with the organisation within its changing environment. The successful organisation is the one which is able to predict, sense and analyse the implications of changes in the environment and adapt its products, structures, systems and relationships to cope with these changes. Change and coping with it is then a theme of organisation theory and it is also an increasingly dominant thread in the field of training itself. Training can roughly be divided into two areas: • training people to do their current jobs better, including preparing people for their next jobs; • equipping people to manage/cope with change. Enough has already been written on the former and we propose in this article to concentrate on the latter. Before doing so, however, we wish to explore the dynamics of organisational change and the key importance of diagnosis in determining what kinds of change interventions, training and other, are necessary in order to create and maintain a healthy, adaptive and effective organisation.

President's Report: The State of the Council

As each president reviews the state of the Council, he recognizes that the professional value and impact of an educational organization is due in large part to the quality of its committees and the coverage they give to the problems of the day. I have been privileged to attend at least one meeting of each major committee of the Council during the past two years, I have learned to know each and every one of their members rather well, and yet I am continually amazed at their wisdom and dedication. Yours is a healthy organization!

President's Report: The State of the Council

As each president reviews the state of the Council, he recognizes that the professional value and impact of an educational organization is due in large part to the quality of its committees and the coverage they give to the problems of the day. I have been privileged to attend at least one meeting of each major committee of the Council during the past two years, I have learned to know each and every one of their members rather well, and yet I am continually amazed at their wisdom and dedication. Yours is a healthy organization!

A Healthy Organization

Human behavior, which is invariably a mixture of reactionary and forward-moving tendencies, is a complex thing and organizations function best when management works with instead of against human attributes. At all levels, the healthy organization must satisfy not only individual but group, inter-group, and the whole organization's needs for both growth and maintenance of the status quo.

Organization as a Moral Problem

THE act of organizing often has been considered a technical problem, and a low level technical problem at that. Hence, uncomplicated, Tinker-Toy-like terms in which study of organization commonly is formulated. To Lepawsky, for example, organization is to administration as skeletology is to medicine. An he noted, be sketched and charted just as human body can be physically depicted. The graphics are not of overpowering difficulty. Indeed, organization is mainly a matter of structure and, Lepawsky concluded, organization is most elementary aspect of administration.' Such analysis has tended to paralyze thought about organization. The analogy of body, or well-oiled machine, is not far below surface of much of work on organization. The mirage of a healthy organization, of an optimum and invariant arrangement of parts, has guided many students and practitioners. The early work in scientific management illustrates point. This early work assumed that the system emerges from and is immanent in 'facts' of existence and emerges from them when they are recorded and manipulated2 in much same way as observation reveals proper relation of bones of a body or parts of a machine. Time has not eliminated this bias. Recent observers still stress search for organization theory.3 This view of organization may be chal-

THE CLIMATES OF THE WORLD, IN REFERENCE TO THEIR EFFECTS ON MAN'S GENERAL WELFARE AND DESTINY

At the present hour, when millions of human beings are leaving their homes in Europe, or contemplate doing so, for countries which may or may not possess a climate similar to that which gave them birth, it cannot fail to be perceived that many interesting inquiries are thereby laid open to science, on which none but the physiologist can enter with advantage. It the race of man, then, in all its varieties, affords general expression of the existing climates of the world, in reference to the circumstances which contribute to healthy organization; if one climate maintains, while another modifies more or less the characteristics of human beings, as is undoubtedly the case, it cannot be out of season to make this investigation: With what result to his own physical conformation and moral character, and more especially to that of his descendants does man, born in a congenial climate, emigrate at random into different zones? Having examined this subject in its many bearings, both by collating the written observations of travellers made cursorily without any immediate scientific object, and by questioning intelligent persons from our colonies, and other newly formed states, I premise with confidence that it is one which is most important and curious. To take a common example; - What a diversity of effects must obviously arise from one member of a family taking up his permanent abode in a portion of the American, and another in a part of the Australasian continent. Both regions afford climates which are called delightful and healthy; but their separate influence on the organization of the European is already perceptible. Indeed, it has been forcibly argued that man cannot travel out of his own zone without entailing extinction on his race. Be this as it may, an inquiry into the subject of isogenetic or congenial zones is of sufficient moment, under the existing conditions and inevitable redistribution of nations, to give basis to a branch of science; nor will it be passed over without due consideration in this series of papers.

THE CLIMATES OF THE WORLD, IN REFERENCE TO THEIR EFFECTS ON MAN'S GENERAL WELFARE AND DESTINY

At the present hour, when millions of human beings are leaving their homes in Europe, or contemplate doing so, for countries which may or may not possess a climate similar to that which gave them birth, it cannot fail to be perceived that many interesting inquiries are thereby laid open to science, on which none but the physiologist can enter with advantage. It the race of man, then, in all its varieties, affords general expression of the existing climates of the world, in reference to the circumstances which contribute to healthy organization; if one climate maintains, while another modifies more or less the characteristics of human beings, as is undoubtedly the case, it cannot be out of season to make this investigation: With what result to his own physical conformation and moral character, and more especially to that of his descendants does man, born in a congenial climate, emigrate at random into different zones? Having examined this subject in its many bearings, both by collating the written observations of travellers made cursorily without any immediate scientific object, and by questioning intelligent persons from our colonies, and other newly formed states, I premise with confidence that it is one which is most important and curious. To take a common example; - What a diversity of effects must obviously arise from one member of a family taking up his permanent abode in a portion of the American, and another in a part of the Australasian continent. Both regions afford climates which are called delightful and healthy; but their separate influence on the organization of the European is already perceptible. Indeed, it has been forcibly argued that man cannot travel out of his own zone without entailing extinction on his race. Be this as it may, an inquiry into the subject of isogenetic or congenial zones is of sufficient moment, under the existing conditions and inevitable redistribution of nations, to give basis to a branch of science; nor will it be passed over without due consideration in this series of papers.