The Organizational Realm

Organizational dynamics might be thought of as the sum total of individual, interpersonal and group dynamics mixed with a healthy dose of reality testing relative to the task environment of the organization. Good reality testing is essential in order to keep competitors from eating your sandwich for lunch. The complexity at this level is once again increased.

Our hierarchical organizations are constructed of many horizontal layers and vertical divisions that introduce communication and coordination discontinuities as a result of organizational fragmentation. Communication, for example, up and down an organizational hierarchy is notoriously inaccurate and fraught with interpretations and reinterpretations that may serve as “spin” to protect one’s domain from another’s oversight. Similarly, communication may be found simply to not occur between divisions and operating sections (organizational silos or smokestacks) that represent specialties with their own language such as legal services, finance and marketing.

There are many other organizational attributes that contribute to the complexity. Leaders throughout an organization may pursue their work and fulfill their responsibilities by using many different leadership styles, some of which are adaptive and some less so. Organizational history is also often a factor where old grudges may linger and misunderstandings predominate. Organization culture is yet another aspect of organizational dynamics that can serve in many ways to make the organization more effective or less so (Diamond, 1993). There is indeed much to comprehend about the organization realm. The challenge is to do so without introducing too many distortions.

Consultants, researchers, executives and employees are, at the organizational level of analysis, faced with so many possible data points that it can seem impossible to locate what is important. This complexity makes it essential to try to encompass as much as possible what is happening within an organization in any model-building effort. It is also essential to be able to locate those elements and trends that are most pronounced at any moment in time. In this regard there is perhaps no better argument for the support of the use of explicit organization models than when trying to understand organizational dynamics, especially if insights are to be shared with others.