Key words: Roethlisberger, Lewin, Herzberg, Harvard, NTL, OB&D

Appropriate Running Head: The Messy History of OB&D

Abstract

The George Washington University organizational behavior students have been privileged to learn from professors who were students of three different founders of the field. These three strands discussed here are Roethlisberger and the Harvard Business School, Kurt Lewin and NTL, and Herzberg. This learning experience is very different from introductory textbooks which give the impression that the field has made consistent, linear progress from the early days until today. The enriched experience includes a sense of the false starts, values conflicts, egos, lack of cross-communication, and other dimensions of the human condition that played a role in the founding of OB&D. This article reviews the development of these strands and points out that, although there are similarities, they were working on different problems, using different data sources, with different units of analysis. The article concludes with a glimpse at how these three founders would view the field of OB&D today.

ERIC B. DENT, Ph.D.

Dr. Dent is presently an assistant professor of administrative sciences at The George Washington University. His research interests include leadership in dynamic, turbulent environments; mental models which underlie organizational behavior; new science and chaos theory applications in organizations, and organizational and adult learning. Dr. Dent is a member of the Editorial Review Board of the Journal of Managerial Issues. He has authored two textbooks, Organization Development (1993) and Management: Perspectives, Processes, and Productivity (1995) and published journal articles on chaos theory, resistance to change, learning organizations, psychology and technology, and many other topics.

For twenty-four years, the students of the Organizational Behavior and Development (OB&D) Group of The George Washington University's School of Business and Public Management have benefitted from an experience which may not have been possible at any other university in the world. Three of the four professors in that group - Peter Vaill ⁽¹⁾, Jerry Harvey, and Erik Winslow ⁽²⁾ - were students of people who helped define the field of OB&D ⁽³⁾. Each was at "ground zero" when part of OB&D as a field was founded. At the time, each was a doctoral student, heavily influenced by one of the seminal contributors to the field, and each played a role in that contribution.

The story of the field of OB&D is a interesting one. The field has experienced considerable achievements. For example, no MBA, management, or business degree program had a required course in OB&D in 1960. By 1970, every major program had one. That is a unusual amount of change in universities in ten short years. The field has also experienced heartaches. NTL (founded as the National Training Laboratories) was the Manhattan Project of group dynamics. ⁽⁴⁾ Yet, by the early 1970s, NTL was deeply in debt and on the verge of bankruptcy.

Introductory texts in OB&D give the impression that the field has made consistent, linear progress from the early days of the field until today. These textbooks do not do a good job of capturing the false starts, the values conflicts, the egos, the commercial incentives, the lack of cross-communication, the blinders that come with certain assurance that one is right, and the mission that each founder of the field felt.

Perhaps one of the strongest features of the field of OB&D has been its openness to embrace any concept, process, or technique which improves human behavior in organizations. As defined today, OB&D includes such disparate areas as group dynamics, workforce diversity management, total quality management, 360 degree performance appraisal, business process reengineering, the learning organization, career planning, strategic planning, leadership development, and dozens of others (Dent, 1993). Although these is no widely accepted categorization of OB&D activities, a typical categorization would include activities in the following four areas: human process, human resource management, strategic management, and technostructural (Cummings and Worley, 1997).

Many OB&D "purists" consider the human process root to be the core of the field. In fact, the work of Vaill, Harvey, and Winslow, and their mentors, all contain human process components (although many would categorize Herzberg's work as primarily technostructural). Yet, the three strands of the field represented by these men developed in virtual isolation from each other. Their interesting stories also offer a useful case study on how knowledge is generated and disseminated in Western society. This history of OB&D is not limited to these three strands. Several other important centers of work would be included in a complete history. The role of this paper is to tell the story of these three strands, through the eyes of the three men who were present and actively involved (albeit primarily as doctoral students) in the early years of these strands.

Peter Brown Vaill was born on November 5, 1936 in St. Cloud, Minnesota. He received his bachelor's education at the University of Minnesota (1958) and his M.B.A. and D.B.A. from Harvard University (1960, 1964). Vaill represents the "Harvard" Business School strand of OB&D which dates to Elton Mayo and Fritz Roethlisberger and the Hawthorne studies. According to Vaill, the "birth certificate" of OB&D is a memo from Roethlisberger which was the first attempt to define OB&D. The memo, reproduced as Exhibit 1, is dated January 13^th, 1961, written shortly after a meeting on January 5^th, 1961.

Jerry Harvey was born on November 14, 1935 in Austin, Texas. He attended the University of Texas for all of his academic training (B.B.A. - 1957; Ph.D. - 1963). In some ways, Harvey bridges two strands of OB&D. At the University of Texas, Harvey was the student of Robert Blake, who, together with Jane Mouton, developed the managerial grid - the most widely used OB&D intervention in the world in the 1960s. For the purposes of this story, Harvey represents the "NTL" strand of OB&D. Harvey first went to NTL's mecca - Bethel, Maine - in the summer of 1960, and became a full-time staff member of NTL upon graduation in 1963. Harvey was later named Associate Director of NTL where he served until 1971. Harvey dates the field of OB&D to the publication of The Human Side of Enterprise by Douglas McGregor in 1960. This work is a comprehensive tour de force, but is best known for the Theory X/Y hypothesis.

Erik Kenelm Winslow was born on July 15, 1937 in Patton, Pennsylvania. He received his bachelor's education at Pennsylvania State University (1963) and his M.S. (1965) and Ph.D. (1967) ⁽⁵⁾ from Case Western Reserve University. Winslow was the protégé of Frederick Herzberg who is most famous for his development of the motivator/hygiene theory of work motivation. Herzberg's January, 1968 Harvard Business Review article, "One More Time: How Do You Motivate Employees" holds the record for the greatest number of reprints sold (Herzberg, in process, 17). Winslow sees the beginning of OB&D coinciding with Herzberg's publication of The Motivation to Work in 1959.

Each of these men carries the legacy of one of the most important developments in the history of OB&D. Each describes the tremendous excitement of an important work in progress. In fact, such excitement was in the air. In The Age of Heretics, Art Kleiner (1996) describes the unbelievably fertile time it was for the development of new ideas.

Beginning in the late 1950s, a growing number of heretics emerged... [people] who saw a truth that ran against its prevailing attitudes. They saw how, despite the power of corporate practice, something desperately desirable had been lost in everyday corporate life: a sense of the value of human relationships and community. They saw how, without that human spirit, corporations could not perform (x).

At this time, a breakthrough in one area would somehow foment a set of new efforts in another. It was a time of questioning everything (Winslow, 1997a). It was also a time in which organizations came into prominence as a platform for the behavioral sciences (Roethlisberger, 1977, 303). A third profound influence on the mentors of these three GWU professors was World War II. Consequently, each of the three strands was driven by the desire to make the world a better place for working and living.

The three stories are not parallel, though. In the sections that follow, different emphases will be described. For example, Roethlisberger's personal development is central to the Harvard strand. The NTL strand is better represented by the outgrowth of what occurred there. The story of the Herzberg strand is necessarily shorter because it was a far smaller effort involving fewer researchers than were the Harvard and NTL strands. Also, of these three stories, the evolution of NTL has been documented the most thoroughly elsewhere. Consequently, those efforts are not recast here.

Thomas Kuhn (1970) has written that a field can be described in terms of its symbolic generalizations, shared commitments to beliefs, values, and exemplars. Exemplars include the basic principles of the field which get handed down in introductory classes. OB&D probably has no greater exemplar than the Hawthorne studies. In fact, "the Hawthorne effect" has become part of the everyday vernacular. The Hawthorne studies have been thoroughly discussed elsewhere ⁽⁶⁾ and will not be addressed here.

FRITZ ROETHLISBERGER and THE HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL

What is of interest here is the impact of the Hawthorne studies upon Roethlisberger (and the "soul" group at Harvard of which Roethlisberger was the leader (Roethlisberger, 1977, 285)). In 1926, the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Foundation awarded a grant of $100,000 a year for a five-year period to the Committee on Industrial Physiology of Harvard University. The committee included two people who would have the most profound intellectual impact upon Roethlisberger's life - Elton Mayo ⁽⁷⁾ and L. J. Henderson, M.D. Elton Mayo had been trained in medicine, but integrated a number of disciplines in the approach he took to interpreting the findings of the Hawthorne studies. From Mayo, Roethlisberger learned what the latter refers to as the "clinical method." In today's OB&D jargon, this method, an "intimate, habitual, intuitive familiarity with the phenomena" (Roethlisberger, 1977, 30) would include non-directive interviewing, active listening, participant observation, and related approaches.

A part of the work at Hawthorne included a project which still today may be the most ambitious interviewing effort ever in organizations. Researchers conducted over 20,000 interviews, taking copious notes of each conversation. The enormous volume of these transcripts is probably still today in boxes somewhere in the Harvard Business School (Vaill, 1997a). The magnitude of this effort is symbolic of Roethlisberger's orientation and beliefs. His autobiography is entitled The Elusive Phenomena and the phenomena to which he refers is man-in-organization. If we assume that the two words in the title were very carefully chosen, note that phenomena is a word associated with explorers. A single adjective which conveys Roethlisberger's persona is curious. Roethlisberger was fascinated by all of the actions of the human actors in organizations. Words such as phenomena and curious, however are not the semantics of quantitative scientists, those certain of their actions, or those with a missionary zeal to persuade others.

For his particular orientation, and not those of this latter list, Roethlisberger owes a considerable debt to L. J. Henderson, a blood chemist who was interested in the Hawthorne studies as a vehicle for experimenting with his ideas of fatigue and other physiological aspects of work. Henderson, however, transcended his own medical education, becoming a "one-book sociologist" (Roethlisberger, 1977, 61) - Sociologie Générale by Vilfredo Pareto. Henderson developed a course known as Sociology 23 which attracted distinguished professors from throughout the university as well as business executives including Chester Barnard, President of New Jersey Bell Telephone Company. Henderson's approach included the importance of: a theoretical framework, a way of testing the framework in practice, utility as the highest value since truth is relative, and researchers being willing to abandon their theoretical frameworks if other concepts are shown to have more utility.(Roethlisberger, 1977, 69-71).

This last item leads into the next major influence of Roethlisberger and the Harvard OB&D group - General Semantics. In 1933, Count Alfred Korzybski published Science and Sanity which contains the famous dictum "the map is not the territory." In other words, never confuse the phenomenon with an abstraction of the phenomenon ⁽⁸⁾. Roethlisberger was fascinated by the enormous role that words play in organizational written and oral communication (Vaill, 1997a). What is the meaning implicit in the selection of one word instead of others? Why did the CEO feel the need to write a memo about this situation but not another? Korzybski gave Roethlisberger the lesson which perplexes many people today - don't confuse a specific entity (say, your sister) with any class she may belong to (women, or sisters). Your sister may have characteristics very different than those often found in any class of which she may belong.

A final influence on Roethlisberger and the Harvard strand, to be mentioned here, is that of social anthropology. Bronislaw Malinowski and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown advocated an approach that is commonly associated with Margaret Mead today. Mayo brought to Harvard, W. Lloyd Warner, a student of Malinowski's who in turn had Conrad Arensburg, Eliot Chapple, and Burleigh Gardner as students. Perhaps their most famous effort was "Yankee City" a pseudonym for a town 40 miles north of Boston. Warner and colleagues studied Yankee City in a way that heretofore had only been done with primitive communities. They attempted to surface the social structure of Yankee City through observation of human interactions. As will be seen below, it is fair to say that Roethlisberger took an anthropologist's stance in his study of organizations. Moreover, he would teach to Harvard Business School students a managerial model which would invite the managers to be practicing anthropologists in their organizations.

Although some of these experiences date to Roethlisberger's earliest adult life, Vaill remembers that they were very present for Roethlisberger as he taught and worked in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Vaill found Roethlisberger fascinated with the nature of the mentality of the action taker. Roethlisberger himself noted that he was "enamored with two closely associated ideas, the idea of a professional manager and the idea of a management science, and how the two could be better realized if the theory and the practice of administration could be better related" (Roethlisberger, 1977, 3).

Roethlisberger's orientation is probably best summed up as holding the reins of the both scientific knowledge and administrative action, and trying to navigate a contribution to the world through the exploration of both. Roethlisberger describes his own internal battle with these two, often competing, allures.

They were jealous mistresses. Each of them nagged at me from a different direction. When one would say, "Get going and become engaged in the business of business" and I was just about ready to do this, the other would say, "What is the business of business?" and I would become immobilized .... I had never really been in love with either of my two mistresses. My early love affair had been with the phenomena [human-behavior-in-organizations] (301).

Roethlisberger enjoyed studying these phenomena. He never had any desire to practice management or run a business (271). His stance was that of an anthropologist on a South Sea Island. He was intensely curious and the kind of person who could provide an incredibly insightful meta-analysis of any human interaction he had observed and/or participated in (Vaill, 1997b). Figure 1., discussed below, is an excellent example of how Roethlisberger participated in a meeting and then produced a comprehensive, thorough, insightful commentary of the proceedings.

Part of Roethlisberger's fascination with these phenomena sprung from his belief that every situation is at least somewhat different from every other. He was opposed to prescribing any "shoulds" and saw his work as investigation and diagnosis, not the application of "science-based theories" (Roethlisberger, 1977, 311). He was well aware of the "sea of values" which he brought to the situation. However, he drew a distinction between values in how someone should proceed in studying an organization, and preformed values about how the organization should be.

In the late 1940s, Roethlisberger became more intentional about formalizing work on these phenomena into graduate management education and a doctoral program. Roethlisberger credits the Ford Foundation with the first use of the term "behavioral sciences" when it reconstituted itself in 1950 and gave large amounts of money for the study of human behavior (195). In 1948 Roethlisberger organized a second-year MBA program elective course entitled "Human Relations" (197). For the better part of the next ten years, Roethlisberger "was concerned primarily with the human relations or communication skills required by persons desirous of improving their interpersonal behavior as individuals or as members or leaders of small groups" (4). Roethlisberger didn't feel that this focus was very productive for him (248).

By 1958 he renewed his focus on "the phenomena of human behavior in organizations and the clinical methods of observation and interviewing for dealing with them" (249). In this year Roethlisberger first used the term "organizational behavior" as a catch-phrase for a new course that had been coalescing at Harvard for a couple of years. He defined organizational behavior as "the study of the way people did behave - and not should behave - in organizations" (279). Through Roethlisberger's administrative duties at the Harvard Business School he advocated for an explicit area or subject matter for organizational behavior. In 1962, Roethlisberger's "'soul group' had become an officially recognized area in the School as well as an officially recognized special field in the Doctoral program" (297). As part of the deliberations for this creation, Roethlisberger produced the memo which is included as Figure 1. below. The memo, never before published, is worth reading twice and the diagram deserves careful study. ⁽⁹⁾

Figure 1.

The First Attempt to Define "Organizational Behavior"

From: F. J. Roethlisberger

About: A More carefully prepared statement of what I tried to say at our last meeting of January 5, 1961, about our own definition of the field of organizational behavior and why its image to others is likely to be unclear.

In talking to the diagram above I tried to make the following points:

1. The field of organizational behavior is concerned with the relations of persons at work in a formal organization.

2. The field is also concerned with how boxes 1, 2, and 3 above are related to each other and to the behavior (box 4) of persons at work in a formal organization.

3. The field is also concerned with the behavior of persons at work in an organization from the points of view of both (a) its determination (box 5) and (b) its improvement (box 6).

4. Our inclusion of box 6 is what forces us to be interdisciplinary and makes of us a unique field.

5. Our inclusion of box 6 is what makes our image to behavioral scientists ambiguous and difficult to communicate.

6. Our inclusion of box 5 is what makes our image to administrators ambiguous and difficult to communicate.

7. The difficulty of specifying clearly the relation of box 5 to box 6 and vice versa is what makes our own image of ourselves to ourselves ambiguous and difficult to talk about.

8. We can talk about the field from four points of view:

(a) how we define our field to ourselves

(b) how we and others perceive the relation of our field to the goals of the School

(c) how we and others perceive the relation of our field to other fields in the School

(d) how we and others perceive the relation of our field to the behavioral sciences

(a) Among ourselves the chief difficulty is point 7 above.

(b) From our point of view the relation of our special field to the goals of the School is only too clear, in fact to us it is so clear as to be embarrassing. And although Abe [Zaleznick] says that history has settled this question for us, it is still not completely agreed upon by many of our colleagues that "administration" can be better taught and hence should be taught apart from production administration, marketing administration, and so forth.

(c) What is our relation to courses which are teaching the nonhuman aspects of administration and to courses which are teaching personnel and labor relations, executive development, and so forth?

(d) How do we communicate to behavioral scientists our concern for the relation between the improvement of knowledge on the one hand and the improvement of practice on the other?

9. As can be seen from a, b, c, and d above, it is box 6 that gets us into all of our troubles (a) with each other, (b) with the goals of the School, (c) with other fields at the School and (d) with the behavioral scientists.

10. Why, then, don't we throw out box 6? It's the chief source of difficulty for ourselves. It is the chief cause for the ambiguous image we give to others. It makes any clear statement of our relation to the central purposes of the School most immodest to state.

11. And yet in terms of our classroom behavior we seem to be unwilling to throw box 6 out. We want it in some sense in as part of the definition of the field.

12. Query: What is going on here (a) at the group process level and (b) at the nongroup process level?

January 13, 1961

Vaill, who attended doctoral seminars of Roethlisberger's for a couple of years, recalls other interesting guidance from Roethlisberger. Although Roethlisberger was certainly a "meta" thinker and observer, he did not allow himself to get entangled in philosophical concerns, and invited his students to do the same. He felt it was better to buy into one conceptual framework and learn all that you can from it, while recognizing that it isn't truth and that there are other frameworks. Learn it thoroughly, collect data with it, live it, breathe it, sleep it (Vaill, 1997a). Vaill remembers Roethlisberger repeating the phrase, "don't cover the waterfront," which was his way of warning that if you constantly jump among conceptual frameworks, you will end up obsessing and go around and around about which one is right (or better). Branch out from a single framework if you like, but not until you have thoroughly digested it. Roethlisberger's direction to doctoral students was to learn the Hawthorne studies, learn the case study method, and learn the classical theory.

KURT LEWIN and NTL

This paper will not attempt to address the history of Kurt Lewin and NTL which are nicely rendered in The Practical Theorist: The Life and Work of Kurt Lewin (1969), The Age of the Heretics (1996), A History of the NTL Institute for Applied Behavioral Science, 1947-1986 (1986), and National Training Laboratories - Its History: 1947-1970 (1974) among others.

Like Herzberg, discussed below, Kurt Lewin served a few years in a world war (I for Lewin, II for Herzberg) and these wartime experiences had a profound impact on much of the work of his life. The experience of war is a topic in his early papers, which also contain the seeds of his later breakthroughs in theory. An initial major development was Lewin's reconceptualizing of the human psyche, which stood in contrast to the view of mainstream psychologists of that day. Lewin viewed a person systemically as "a complex energy field in which all behavior could be conceived of as a change in some state of a field during a given unit of time" (Marrow, 1969, 30). Each person is affected by a number of psychological tensions, both positive and negative. These tensions, which grow out of a human need, allow a person to achieve her goals. Lewin believed that behavior could be best understood by exploring psychic tensions in a psychic field which he referred to as "life space." Lewin's early work (with his many doctoral students), before leaving Germany in 1933, were empirical inquiries into the psychological tensions of recall of unfinished tasks, level of aspiration, substitution, satiation, and anger, all within life space.

Lewin was also responsible for major contributions in research methodology. Lewin's contemporaries often set up elaborate laboratory experiments "that were more or less unrelated to one another and consisted largely of collecting facts which were then further analyzed into their smaller components" (Marrow, 1969, 29). Real life situations were virtually ignored, considered the domain of psychoanalysts. Lewin believed that empirical evidence should only be collected within the framework of a theory. Moreover, he eschewed much of the artificiality of the laboratory for as realistic conditions of a total experience as possible. At the time, many psychologists were repeating experiments many, many times in search of universal principles in psychology. Lewin argued that a single case, studied comprehensively, provided more valid data than the averaging of many cases. The researcher had to explicate all of the psychological tensions and the environmental forces to capture the totality of a single case. A single case studied in this way proved far more useful than many cases which identified or focused on fewer dynamics (Marrow, 1969, 59).

By the early 1940s, Lewin shifted his focus from the psychology of the individual to the psychology of the group. Lewin believed that a group could be studied using the same process he developed for the single person - an explication of all of the group dynamics and the environmental forces. Lewin and his colleagues spent a number of years conducting research on group processes at the Harwood Manufacturing Company, a pajama factory in Virginia. Although this comprehensive effort is much less known than the Hawthorne studies, the research which came out of it has perhaps had a greater impact on organizations today. Harwood yielded important research on group decision making processes, self-management, leadership development, meeting management, stereotyping, and resistance to change, among others.

Although Lewin was intensely interested in these industrial experiments, his primary passion remained in the area of social change. Lewin spent much of the time after he left Germany trying to establish a Psychological Institute of the Hebrew University which would assist Jews who were terribly affected by the discriminatory actions heaped upon them. He believed that what happened to a Jew after escaping the Nazi regime was almost as important as the escape itself (Marrow, 1969, 82). Although Lewin's vision for this institute never came to fruition, he did launch the Commission on Community Interrelations for the American Jewish Congress and the Research Center for Group Dynamics (RCGD). The RCGD was the precursor for the National Training Laboratories. The NTL founders, Leland Bradford, Ronald Lippitt, and particularly Ken Benne, were also ardent foes of the totalitarian ideologies which arose in Europe and Asia (and to some degree in the United States in the form of McCarthyism). For them, spreading a democratic mindset was always at the forefront of their work. Lewin's untimely death occured just prior to NTL's first seminars which were held in the summer of 1947. NTL's method for addressing the major social problems of the world was to involve people in training groups which would lead to an understanding of social dynamics. In a t-group, the "flow of conversation is also the subject of the same conversation and ... people's understandings of themselves and each other seem to flow naturally to the surface" (Kleiner, 1996, 35).

In its first decade, NTL was a basic research group, primarily of social psychologists. The primary purpose of the organization was the generation and free exchange of research and ideas. Consulting or practical application of the work at NTL was not considered appropriate. Sometime in the mid-1950s, the emphasis shifted from basic research to helping individuals. The purpose of the t-group subtly changed from understanding social dynamics to training people in leadership "to become more effective leaders by employing the learnings of democratic/egalitarian involvement in group decision making" (Hirsch, 1986, 33). Individuals who were part of NTL for a number of years can look back and see a number of shifts which took place over time. They were not evident at the time, however, because the changes occured at a gradual pace (Hirsch, 1986, 54).

A second gradual shift is that NTL courted big business and became itself a big business. Part of the shift toward a business mindset at NTL was precipitated by Robert Blake who first copyrighted his work. Until then, any idea presented or created at NTL was considered part of the flow of the creation of knowledge (Harvey, 1997a). This issue, plus Blake's method of "instrumenting" t-groups resulted in Blake splitting with NTL in early 1960 (Kleiner, 1996, 58).

In the summer of 1960, Blake sent Harvey to NTL at Bethel, Maine as a "spy," to find out something wrong which would allow Blake to discredit NTL (Harvey, 1997a). Harvey had became a student of Blake's at the University of Texas in the late 1950s, and had experience with Blake as a doctoral advisee, teaching assistant, and co-consultant. Rather than finding something wrong in Bethel, Harvey found an environment which was the most invigorating of his life.

At NTL that summer was the "Who's Who" of social psychology - Warren Bennis, Dick Beckhard, Rensis Likert, Chris Argyris, Douglas McGregor, Ron Lippitt, Gordon Lippitt, Herb Shepard, and several other luminaries of the field. Although Lewin never lived to see NTL, his presence was still dominant in 1960 (Harvey, 1997b). NTL would frequently hold theory sessions on force field analysis, resistance to change, changing food habits, and other aspects of Lewin's work. Additionally, each day one of the staff members would present a current theory session in the gymnasium of Gould Academy. The NTL community sat in the bleachers above deciding who would be invited to continue with NTL and who would not (Harvey, 1997a). As a 24-year-old doctoral student, Harvey was slated to present the same week as McGregor, Benne, Bennis, and Gordon Lippitt. Harvey passed the "test" and was invited to become a part of the regular NTL staff, later becoming the associate director.

Several of these prominent researchers used NTL as a place for incubating ideas, or "test-marketing" theories and concepts. A few of these contributions will be briefly discussed here. In Personality and Organization, for example, Chris Argyris (1957) set out to integrate the existing literature on human behavior in organizations extant at the time. Interestingly, he notes that "not one area of inquiry presently being studied has been explored to the minimum limits required by scientific standards" (x) in this subject area. Argyris's work is arrayed by organizational level. He distinguishes between human behavior as seen at the individual, group, and organizational levels. The primary questions he addressed are "What are the basic components of organization? How does organization tend to evolve? How does it tend to maintain itself internally?" (xii). Argyris's work is framed around how work life influences human behavior.

It would have been interesting to eavesdrop on a conversation between Argyris and Rensis Likert, who describes the state of the field somewhat differently in his book, New Patterns of Management published only four years later, Likert (1961) claims that "it is now possible to measure such dimensions of organizational functioning as motivational forces, communication effectiveness, and decision-making processes" (5). Likert's book is filled with the findings of hundreds of research efforts conducted at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan using sample-interview survey, controlled field experiments, and refined methods of statistical and mathematical analysis. Examples of these findings include: "employee-centered" supervisors are higher producers than "job-centered" producers (7); that departments in which people feel the greatest freedom out-produce those in which employees feel the least freedom - Likert writes, "the common assumption that non supervisory employees, given increased freedom, will loaf and not produce does not seem to be borne out by the evidence" (20); and, that there is a marked inverse relationship between the average amount of "unreasonable" pressure the people in a department feel and the productivity of the department (8). Likert's work is an effort to explicate the management principles and practices achieving the best results in organizations at the time.

Lippitt and Seashore (1962) agree with Likert that research tools have advanced to the point where it is "possible to analyze the dynamics of a group and to diagnose with considerable accuracy its behavior, the difficulties it will encounter, and some effective ways it can deal with its problems" (15). The orientation of their small book is to offer a method for understanding groups and their behavior and steps leaders and group members can take to improve a group's operation. They suggest that a group should be studied in terms of its "background, pattern of participation and communication, atmosphere and cohesion, subgroupings, standard procedures, goals, leader and member behavior" (23). Furthermore, they suggest that the research on groups has provided "persuasive evidence" of certain principles of group behavior. These would include: that successful group productivity depends on the ability of the members to exchange ideas freely and to feel involved, and, that the ability of a group to function properly is not necessarily dependent on the leader, but on the willingness of group members to assume responsibility for the way the group acts (15).

Douglas McGregor adds yet another dimension to the NTL strand. McGregor begins at a place which was very different from the industrial-organizational psychologists of the time (and still today). McGregor (1960) writes,

[The making of managers] is to a much greater degree the result of management's conception of the nature of its task and of all the policies and practices which are constructed to implement this conception....

Even if we possessed methods enabling us to do a perfect job of selecting young men [sic] with the capacity of becoming top executives, the practical gain for industry would be negligible under today's condition. The reason is that we have not learned enough about the utilization of talent, about the creation of a climate conducive to human growth (vi).

One of McGregor's primary contributions was to focus the field on the assumptions managers were making about people. He argued that the nature of these assumptions was more critical than the selection, training, and development of managers. He also suggested that the field knew very little about these assumptions and how they were manifest in organizational life. From this vantage, McGregor offered the Theory X and Theory Y assumptions about people. Although Theory X/Y has taken on a life of its own, often different from McGregor's original conceptualization, what he wrote in The Human Side of Enterprise is that Theory X includes the traditional view of employees needing direction and control. Theory Y includes the assumption that employees will want to work toward organizational goals as long as they don't conflict with individual goals.

Although NTL exists today as a successful professional association, it has been many years since it was the greenhouse of new concepts, the centrifugal force of this strand. Several factors have contributed to the present situation.

• The initial mission (recall the title of the organization Lewin founded - Research Center for Group Dynamics) focused on basic research and exploration into group process. As NTL transitioned primarily to providing training in democratic leadership, the creative fervor of the early days waned.
• The focus also shifted from group dynamics to individual and personal growth.
• Perhaps the passage with the greatest impact was from a research focus to a business focus. NTL began training change agents, luring corporate clients, and copyrighting ideas. The last brought an abrupt halt to the free exchange of ideas. Before people began copyrighting their works, NTL was the key crucible in which ideas were built and analyzed. Later, people had an incentive to keep their ideas to themselves so that they could have an advantage in capitalizing on them (Harvey, 1997a).

Finally, NTL never dealt in the 1950s and 1960s with its cobbler's-kids-have-no-shoes issues. An organization which taught democratic leadership skills and appreciation for diversity was not managed democratically and did little to make itself diverse.

FREDERICK HERZBERG

The first two strands discussed in this paper are more alike than the Herzberg strand is with either. Still, there are a number of interesting commonalities and parallels. Each of the three strands would diagnose the ills of an organization in the same way - the organizations had become unwieldy and impersonal, employees did not feel excited about their jobs, management did not readily tap into the employees' ideas, and so forth. Much of the differences in the strands are in the assumptions and peculiarities of the academic disciplines, as outlined in Table 1 below. For example, whereas the work of NTL was primarily in social psychology (especially earlier in NTL's history), Herzberg's work was in industrial psychology, and there was very little overlap between these subdisciplines.

Like Lewin, Herzberg was profoundly affected by World War II. He served as an American soldier and helped

at the liberation of Dachau concentration camp near Munich, Germany. The first thing we saw as we entered were the rows of railroad cars filled with lime-covered corpses.... Nothing in my education in history or psychology had prepared me for this experience. The shock has influenced all my thinking.... I concluded that the most important role of a psychologist was to help the sane from going insane. (Herzberg, in process, 5).

Herzberg's doctoral degree is from the University of Pittsburgh in clinical psychology with an emphasis in physiology. He spent a considerable amount of time working in the public health school. There he discovered that all of the work in the field of mental health was directed toward mental illness. The notion of mental health was not an organizing concept for the field and no widely accepted definition of mental health existed (Herzberg, in process, 7).

Herzberg was also influenced by a shift in the field of psychology which began in the 1930s. At that time, several highly educated psychologists (such as Kurt Lewin) were leaving Europe and coming to the United States. They expected to find that the field of psychology was conceptually centered around the work of people such as Dewey and James, but found instead that the highly regarded scholars in the field were Thorndike and Watson (Winslow, 1997a). The latter had anchored the field in behavioralism and empirical study. The newcomers from Europe broadened the field to include more existential and phenomenonlogical work.

John Flanagan was a mentor who greatly inspired Herzberg. Flanagan directed his doctoral work and managed him in the Air Force Psychology program. Flanagan, who later founded the American Institutes for Research (AIR) was able to dramatically improve the selection of flight crews by using his critical incidents technique to discover what the job requirements were for these positions. The basic premise of this method is that a job is best represented by the most important tasks that comprise it. Potential candidates can then be matched with their ability to perform these tasks. The critical incidents are identified by having people who have mastered these important tasks describe the full experience of task completion - what began it, when it reached a high point, when it ended.

Herzberg together with colleagues Bernard Mausner and Barbara Block Snyderman adapted the critical incident technique to the work of accountants and engineers. They added to Flanagan's approach by asking employees how they felt during the experiences they were describing. Herzberg and colleagues essentially asked two questions: 1) Think of a time when you were exceptionally satisfied by your job. What was going on? 2) Think of a time when you were really dissatisfied. What was going on then? This approach solved a basic problem Herzberg had discovered. In analyzing all of the motivation research to that point, he found that the results the researchers obtained depended on the method they used to get the data. ⁽¹⁰⁾

The results of this study were published in 1959 as Motivation to Work. This publication "caused great controversy and consternation in industrial psychology, chiefly because it called into question the attitude measurement instruments on which psychologists make their living" (Herzberg, in process, 10). The attitude measurement instruments are based on linear dimensions, so that, by definition, the opposite of love is hatred or the opposite of objective is subjective. Herzberg, et al discovered that satisfaction and dissatisfaction were two separate factors, giving rise to the motivator-hygiene theory.

In a nutshell, Herzberg suggested that workers have two basic desires, to grow and to avoid pain. These dimensions are separate and distinct. When people are not growing, things in the environment hurt. By the same token, no amount of pain avoidance can substitute for growth. At work, growth (the motivator factor) is represented by things such as achievement, responsibility, recognition for achievement, and the challenge of the work itself. The pain avoidance (the hygiene factor) consists of company policy, interpersonal relations, salary, and others.

Although Herzberg's work was controversial in the academic community, it was immediately popular in industry. In the late 1950s, the United States' economy was in a tremendous boom. The issue of motivation was critical for retaining good people who often had several other opportunities. The primary advice coming from industrial psychologists was to motivate through proper wage and salary administration. So, employers were paying higher and higher salaries and felt that they were not getting higher amounts of performance. Herzberg's work validated what the employers were feeling (Winslow, 1997a). Herzberg suggested that additional performance would not come from higher salaries, but by giving employees the opportunity to create and impact their environments.

Herzberg's conclusion was that the design of the jobs was the secret to organizational success. This conclusion was very different from what NTL generated. Simply put, NTL advocated positive social interactions and democratic (theory Y) leadership. Herzberg claimed that employers couldn't recreate the growth (motivator) factor by having people be nicer to each other. Differences like this resulted in screaming matches between Herzberg and Blake at APA conventions (Winslow, 1997a). Interestingly, although this conclusion caused a rift with many other psychologists, it was consistent with the work of Taylor, the industrial engineers of the late 1950s, Deming, and management experts such as George Odiorne (who in 1963 debated Chris Argyris on the value of T-groups (Kleiner, 1996, 228)). Moreover, although Herzberg would be in sharp disagreement with the Harvard and NTL strands on specific issues, in general he would relate better to these groups than would most industrial psychologists at the time who were focused on selection and measurement, fatigue studies, attitude measurement, and wage and salary administration (Winslow, 1997a).

Winslow describes Herzberg as feeling that people have either focused on parts of his work without including the full picture or largely misunderstood his work. For example, many believe Herzberg to suggest that money and other hygiene factors are not important for motivating workers. Herzberg found that most people don't ascribe to the notion popularized on bumper stickers, "He who dies with the most toys wins." From his medical training, Herzberg learned that humans are the only creatures known to be aware that they are time bound. Consequently, humans are presented with the existential dilemma - what are we doing here? Herzberg's answer is that people are on earth to grow, develop, and create, and these activities are central to the motivator factor. This finding doesn't discount the importance of the hygiene factor or the variability in people.

COMMENTARY of the THREE STRANDS

Most textbooks today present the contributions of the Roethlisberger, Lewin, and Herzberg strands as a homogenized, linear series of steady contributions toward the modern state of affairs. These texts do not mention the shouting matches and some of the fundamental differences among the strands. Ironically, they ignore the human aspects of research conducted by people who devoted their lives to surfacing the human dimensions of work. Certainly, as mentioned above, the three strands have a tremendous amount of commonality. They are all directed toward fixing the same problems. To varying degrees, each has similar values of democracy, openness, participation by workers in organizational decision-making, the inherent desire in nearly everyone to want to do a good job, and so forth.

However, just below this common surface, lie a number of differences and sharp contrasts. In some instances, a strand takes a stand which fundamentally contrasts with another. For example, the Herzberg strand believed that the most important objective for a manager is to design jobs which are highly motivating to people. As mentioned above, Herzberg believed you could put people in dozens of t-groups and it wouldn't make a bit of difference because the growth factor cannot be created by people being nicer to each other (Winslow, 1997b). The Lewin/NTL strand believed that the job design was essentially irrelevant if the group dynamics were dysfunctional. Much of this difference, and that of academic disciplines generally, can be explained by what the field sees as a "given" and what it sees as a "variable" (Roethlisberger, 1977, 321). The area of Herzberg's focus, job design, was a "given" to the Lewin/NTL strand. For the most part, they assumed the technological and formal organization was properly aligned (or was irrelevant, or would be so if the group dynamics were treated). Likewise, for Herzberg the interpersonal dynamics were a given (or irrelevant, or assumed to be in alignment if the jobs got properly designed).

The Lewin/NTL and Roethlisberger/Harvard strands, different from the Herzberg strand, share the assumption of the importance of interpersonal dynamics. Additionally, they share an interest in the relation of theory to practice and in the creation and utilization of knowledge. There is some "crossover" between these strands. For example, Roethlisberger went to Bethel, Maine in 1953 for six or eight weeks (Roethlisberger, 1977, 222) ⁽¹¹⁾. Roethlisberger comments that at that time, NTL's work and Harvard's were considered to be separate activities, not at all similar. However, Roethlisberger found the commonalities mentioned in this paper, and seems to have established a good rapport with Leland Bradford, the NTL director. Roethlisberger identified a number of important differences between his work and that of NTL.

• NTL placed less emphasis on the task dimension of groups than Harvard did.
• Harvard focused almost exclusively on the business context while NTL also included community groups and other non-business organizations.
• Harvard focused on the manager in the organization as the change agent while NTL focused on an external change agent (a consultant).
• A difference of less importance to Roethlisberger was that he had concentrated more on the two-person relationship than NTL, which concentrated on the small group.
• Another difference Roethlisberger saw as minor was that he used there-and-then data, cases, as the source of data while NTL used here-and-now data, t-group discussion. To Roethlisberger, this difference was also made smaller because he "paid as much attention to the discussion of the case (here-and-now data) as to the case itself (there-and-then data)" (223).

Roethlisberger also found certain aspects of NTL as "on the verge of becoming a cult" (226). By the time Vaill was at Harvard a few years later, Roethlisberger was dismissing NTL as religion or self help (Vaill, 1997b). Consequently, Lewin's name only came up in passing during Vaill's years at Harvard.

Harvey is comfortable with the fervor of NTL being equated to that of a religion. Those active in NTL hoped that Harvard people would come to Bethel so that they could be "converted." There was no thought given to a collegial exchange of ideas. The NTL trainers didn't believe that the Harvard strand had any interesting ideas. The mood was that if only they would come to Bethel, they would see the error of their ways and then see the light (Harvey, 1997b). These early days of NTL were much like a secular revival meeting (Harvey, 1997a). At these revivals, discussions exclusively, or at least primarily were about work done by NTL trainers. The Hawthorne studies, the foundation of the Harvard strand, would be mentioned only in passing, if at all. Some books by NTLers, though, do make reference to Roethlisberger's contributions. Argyris, for example, quotes Roethlisberger on the definition of a skill and accepts Roethlisberger's formulation that personality is an organism (Argyris, 1957, 10).

If Herzberg's name ever came up, he would be characterized derisively as someone outside the limits of decency and common sense (Harvey, 1997b). Apparently, many of these prominent researchers had an irritating way because they were so sure of the correctness of their own work and consequently of the inferiority of the work of others (Winslow, 1997a).

The Herzberg strand had even less cross activity with either of the other two. Herzberg's name does not appear in Roethlisberger's autobiography, which, more than a typical autobiography, also serves as a history of the evolution of OB&D, from Roethlisberger's perspective. Roethlisberger did believe that Herzberg's work was interesting and relevant (Vaill, 1997b). Roethlisberger and Herzberg shared the same emphasis on the task dimension compared with NTL. Herzberg was less critical of the Harvard strand than NTL, but he also felt that Roethlisberger was missing the main point if the Harvard strand didn't focus on where meaning and passion were present in organizations.

Winslow and the industrial psychology group of doctoral students at Case Western Reserve University did participate in a t-group run by Herb Shepard (Winslow, 1997b). The experience wasn't especially enlightening for any of them, possibly because, different from a typical t-group, every participant was a scientist of human behavior, more interested in understanding the technique than participating fully in the process. It seems that academic "walls" can be less permeable than geographic distance because, although the Shepards and Herzberg were on the Case Western campus, Winslow (1997b) doesn't believe they ever discussed each others' work.

Table 1. contains a summary of a number of important differences among the three strands. Although there are similarities in areas such as core values, there are opposites in views of behavioral change and differences in the focus of attention, for example.

________________________________________________________________

Table 1. Comparison of the OD Strands descending from Herzberg, Lewin, and Roethlisberger.

FORTY YEARS of HINDSIGHT

I invited each of the GWU faculty to speculate on how their mentors would view the state of organizational behavior today. Vaill sees Roethlisberger maintaining his anthropological stance and being very curious about today's state of affairs. He would wonder what has caused organizations to have a continual stream of improvement programs, often called the "flavor of the month" in industry. What do executives and organizations gain from that approach? What do they expect them to accomplish? Roethlisberger would also be fascinated by the explosion of training and development. Why is this seen as the predominant method of learning in organizations? What has it accomplished (Vaill, 1997b)?

Vaill also imagines Roethlisberger as dismayed by the seeming disconnect between the proliferation of knowledge and the relative lack of appropriate application of that knowledge. The history of the last twenty years reinforces Roethlisberger's belief that work in box 5 does not necessarily improve box 6 (Figure 1). Roethlisberger would be very dismayed at the state of M.B.A. education. He would see it as overly quantified and essentially "puzzle solving ⁽¹²⁾" rather than leadership development.

Harvey believes the NTL fellows of 1960 would be greatly disappointed by the state of OB&D research and practice today. The field has not generated in the past twenty-five years any ideas that were as dramatic as several which came out of NTL in the late 1950s and early 1960s (Harvey, 1997a). The commercialization of the field has caused a tremendous restriction on the creation of new knowledge. People don't have the incentive to participate in extended dialogues in which great ideas get built from a thought here and an insight there.

The NTL luminaries would be equally pessimistic about the state of organizational development practice. The average manager in the United States today does not practice even the very basic principles surfaced by NTL forty years ago. The embracing of reengineering, diversity programs, and 360 degree performance appraisals is probably doing organizations more harm than good (Harvey, 1997b).

Herzberg is the youngest of the strand representatives and is still alive at this writing. Because of his ill health, Winslow (1997b), rather than the author posed the question of his perspective on the state of OB&D today. Herzberg sees encouraging evidence, but it is outweighed by discouraging evidence. For him, the 1970s was the decade of job enrichment, but most organizational leaders today have lost sight of enrichment and given up the gains of the 1970s. Ironically, job enrichment did occur in the 1980s as a side effect of the significant downsizing that occurred. The jobs remaining couldn't help but be enriched.

Herzberg holds firm in his belief in the centrality of meaning in work. He supports the trend toward "spirit" or "spirituality" in the workplace. In Industry Week editorials in the 1980s Herzberg grounded his theory in the major world religions (which he refers to as "mystery systems") and encouraged global leaders to determine how meaning is defined in these varying mystery systems and enrich jobs in those countries accordingly (Herzberg, 1984).

This positive trend is far outweighed by what Herzberg sees as two huge problems. Firstly, that technology is being introduced into the workplace in such a way that passion and meaning are eradicated. Secondly, that organizations have succumbed to "management direction by the abstract fields of finance and marketing as opposed to production and sales, where palpable knowledge of clients and products reside. These abstract fields are more conducive to movement [punishment and rewards] than motivation." Herzberg continues, "I find the new entrants in the world of work on the whole a passionless lot intent on serving financial indexes rather than clients and products" (1987, 120).

On a final note, Herzberg extends a conciliatory gesture to the different strands in this paper and elsewhere. He wishes he emphasized the positive role that the work of other perspectives had played in the understanding of organizational effectiveness. These are wise words for each of us who is quick to defend our own work and point out the shortcomings of others'.

REFERENCES

Argyris, C. (1957). Personality and organization: The conflict between system and the individual. New York: Harper and Row.

Bradford, L. P. (1974). National training laboratories - its history: 1947-1970. Bethel, ME: NTL Institute.

Cummings, T. G. and Worley, C. G. (1997) Organization Development and Change, Sixth Edition, Cincinnati: South-Western College Publishing.

Dent, E. B. (forthcoming). "The changes in individual worldview needed for organizational success," Emergence: A Journal of Complexity Issues in Organizations and Management.

Dent, E. B. (1993). Organization Development. College Park, MD: University of Maryland Press.

Harvey, J. B. (January 31, 1997a). Class lecture.

Harvey, J. B. (April 14, 1997b). Author interview.

Herzberg, F. (in process). Happiness and unhappiness: A brief autobiography. unpublished manuscript.

Herzberg, F. (1987). "One more time: How do you motivate employees?" Harvard Business Review. Vol. 65, No. 5, 109-120.

Herzberg, F. (1984). "Mystery systems shape loyalties," Industry Week. Vol. 223 No. 4, pp. 101-104.

Herzberg, F. (1976). The managerial choice: to be efficient and to be human. Homewood, Ill.: Dow Jones-Irwin.

Herzberg, F. (1966). Work and the nature of man. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell.

Herzberg, F.; Mausner, B., and Snyderman, B. (1959). The motivation to work. New York: Wiley.

Hirsch, J. I. (1986). A history of the NTL institute for applied behavioral science, 1947-1986. Ed.D. Dissertation. Boston University School of Education.

Kleiner, A. (1996). The age of heretics: Heroes, outlaws, and the forerunners of corporate change. New York: Currency Doubleday.

Kuhn, T. S. (1970). The structure of scientific revolution. 2nd edition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Likert, R. (1961). New patterns of management. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Marrow, A. (1969). The practical theorist: The life and work of Kurt Lewin. New York: Basic Books.

McGregor, D. (1960). The human side of enterprise. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Roethlisberger, F. J. (1977). The elusive phenomena: An autobiographical account of my work in the field of organizational behavior at the harvard business school. Lombard, George, editor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Roethlisberger, F. J. (1964). Toward a unified theory of management. Koontz, Harold, editor. New York: McGraw Hill.

Vaill, P. B. (March 7 and 14, 1997a). Class lectures.

Vaill, P. B. (April 10, 1997b). Author interview.

Winslow, E. K. (February 7, 1997a). Class lecture.

Winslow, E. K. (May 5, 1997b). Author interview.

1. In September 1997 Vaill became the Endowed Chair Professor of Management Education at St. Thomas University in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

2. The other professor in the group is John Lobuts, who received his degrees in schools of education. The group also included Gordon Lippitt until his death in 1985.

3. Other universities may have different names for this discipline such as Human Relations, Organizational Behavior, or others.

4. an analogy offered by Jerry Harvey.

5. Winslow worked with Herzberg for two additional years post-graduate.

6. See for example, works by Mayo and Roethlisberger. The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization by Mayo or Management and the Worker by Roethlisberger and Bill Dickson. Several historical accounts have been written including Manufacturing Knowledge: a History of the Hawthorne Experiments by Richard Gillespie.

7. Roethlisberger refers to Mayo as his intellectual mother and to Henderson as his intellectual father (60).

8. Examples would include: A person is not just his (MBTI) personality profile; the sheet music for a symphony does not fully represent the symphony; a two-dimensional photograph of a face does not fully depict the actual face.

9. Roethlisberger's most general statement, at that time, of what the field was about is described in "The Contributions of the Behavioral Sciences to a General Theory of Management," written in 1962 for a conference at UCLA and published in Toward a Unified Theory of Management, edited by Harold Koontz.

10. This same criticism has been leveled at Herzberg.

11. Interestingly, Lewin also spent two semesters at Harvard as a visiting professor. There is no indication that Lewin and Roethlisberger ever met since Roethlisberger was in the business school. Lewin seems to have found the Harvard psychology department filled with congenial professors, but he was more comfortable in the Harvard Psychological Clinic (Marrow, 1969, 136). Lewin did count Harvard psychology professor Gordon Allport as a close colleague.

12. This phrase boils the M.B.A. down to a process of faculty telling students different organizational problems, telling them algorithms for solving those problems, and then testing to see if students can apply the algorithms correctly.