Dynamic Workplace Theory

One of the major perplexities confronting those who want to understand groups and to work with them effectively is how to explain the great differences in “groupness” that distinguish groups from one another. Why is it that the attendance of one group is so irregular as to result in its slow death while the attendance of another group with similar activities and leadership remains high? What makes a group “healthy” so that its members work harder, make more sacrifices for the group, more readily extol its virtues, seem happier together, interact more often, and agree with one another more readily than do the members of a dying organization?

(Cartwright and Zander, 1960, p. 69)

Dynamic workplace theory focuses attention not on the concrete aspects of organizations such as physical plant, production lines, marketing and profit, but rather on the more subtle and harder to understand side of the workplace—groups and their dynamics. The workplace is readily understood to be composed of task groups, teams, departments and divisions. How all of the many kinds of groups function and relate to each other in large part determines the viability of the organization. The reader is again reminded that the words “group” and “organization” are, for the balance of the book, used in an interchangeable manner. It is important to appreciate at the outset that, while groups and organizations have readily apparent physical parameters, they also represent unique experiential and cultural settings that evoke one kind of experience over another. This chapter begins with a case example that presents the context onto which dynamic workplace theory may be overlaid to help locate insight and meaning in what may otherwise be a complex and overwhelming experience of the psychological and social aspects of the workplace.