Groups are organized for different purposes, but all units
are alike in one respect: they are intended to be useful to members, nonmembers,
or both. If groups are to serve a specific function, it follows that the
purposes of groups shift as the desires of those who have a stake in the group
change—different wishes or interests cause new requirements.
(Zander, 1985, p. 33)
Thus organizations are composed of interdependent groups having
different immediate goals, different ways of working, different formal training,
even different personality types within them. These differences make for
different styles of functioning within them.
(Levinson, 1972, p. 3)
It is relatively recent that theorists have suggested that
organization structure may be designed and developed through a set of
motivations that may be other than rational. . . . These theorists suggest that
organization structures are created to reflect unconscious fantasies associated
with the wishes and needs of executives. These unconscious fantasies may be
associated with the wish for power, idealization, order, security, and
domination, as well as fear of loss and castration.
(Czander, 1993, p. 103)
The workplace, regardless of whether it is a small
fifty-employee retail store or a global enterprise employing hundreds of
thousands of workers, is filled with a hard-to-know complexity that we most
often pretend is not there in order to function in our jobs. The vastness of
workplace attributes overwhelms efforts to enumerate them, much less understand
them as a dynamic whole where their unlimited interactions further multiply the
vastness to unimaginable proportions. This appreciation amounts to a humbling
additional proviso for this book and you the reader. There is no way all of this
can be addressed for what it is. We are rather reduced to locating ways of
thinking about this complexity that do not do a gross injustice to the true
nature of the workplace. At the same time the cognitive maps that we use must
provide us reasonably good insights that permit us to come to some understanding
of the workplace and how it relates to us and how we relate to it. This chapter
provides an overview and historical perspective of the evolving complexity of
the workplace and the development of cognitive maps, models and theories for
understanding it. I begin the discussion with a review of several serviceable
perspectives of the workplace that I have found to be of use as an executive and
as a management consultant. The reader is reminded that a fast path through the
chapter is provided in the form of summaries.