Start with the Workplace and Build the Theory

This is also a time-tested approach. Newton, while sitting under a tree, watched an apple fall and he wondered why. When one looks about within the workplace there are many organizational attributes, artifacts, events, trends, goals and leadership styles, to list but a few elements of the workplace, that provoke the question why. As one observes more facets to the phenomenon under study, there may emerge the appearance of causality thereby leading to hypotheses and conclusions as to why things happen as they do. This strategy for building organizational theory also confronts some limitations. One important limitation is that there are limits to how much can be observed or probed, especially if one wants to keep one’s job. There are, therefore, limits to how much data can be collected. Perfect data is not available, much less perfect information and knowledge. A second related aspect to this is that experiments to test the efficacy of one’s organization theory or model are not possible unless you are the boss and perhaps not even then. It is reasonable to conclude that it is hard to test one’s insights against reality. A third important limitation, as already mentioned, is that as a theory develops it often introduces observer bias in favor of supporting the theory. Last, it is also the case that elements of workplaces vary across organizations thereby introducing the likelihood that a good theory developed to account for worklife in one organization may not generalize to other organizations.

The theory described in this book arises in this manner, from firsthand experience in the workplace, therefore, making its elements familiar to anyone with work experience in a large organization. The model may be understood to be backward engineered from work experience to explain what can be observed at work. In this regard the reader must critically examine it for its veracity based on the above theory-building provisos.