Organisational Behaviour II: Interpersonal Behaviour, Group Dynamics, Leadership, Communication, Power and Authority, Stress, and Organisational Change and Development

The Johari window, devised by Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham in 1955 (the name joins their first names), maps self-awareness in relationships as four panes: the open area (known to self and to others), the blind area (known to others but not to self), the hidden area (known to self but not to others) and the unknown area (known to neither). Interpersonal effectiveness grows as the open area is enlarged, by feedback from others (which shrinks the blind area) and by self-disclosure (which shrinks the hidden area).

Transactional analysis, developed by the psychiatrist Eric Berne (Games People Play, 1964), analyses interactions in terms of three ego states: Parent (taught attitudes, nurturing or critical), Adult (rational, fact-based processing) and Child (felt emotions, natural or adapted). A transaction is complementary when the response comes from the ego state addressed and returns to the one that sent it (Adult to Adult); it is crossed when the response comes from an unexpected ego state, and communication breaks down; it is ulterior when a hidden psychological message lies under the social one. Thomas Harris's I'm OK – You're OK (1967) described four life positions: I'm OK – You're OK (healthy), I'm OK – You're not OK (distrustful, blaming), I'm not OK – You're OK (inferior, dependent) and I'm not OK – You're not OK (futile). "Strokes" are units of recognition, positive or negative. William Schutz's FIRO-B measures three interpersonal needs: inclusion, control and affection.

Group dynamics, a term associated with Kurt Lewin, is the study of the forces operating within groups. Groups are formal (command groups, task forces, committees) or informal (friendship and interest groups, which the Hawthorne studies showed can control output). Bruce Tuckman's model (1965) describes development in four stages — forming (uncertainty about purpose and structure), storming (intra-group conflict over control), norming (cohesion and shared norms) and performing (energy on the task) — to which Tuckman and Mary Ann Jensen added adjourning (1977). The punctuated-equilibrium model (Connie Gersick) proposes instead that temporary groups work in two phases separated by a transition at the midpoint of their time.

• Norms are shared standards of acceptable behaviour; roles are expected behaviour patterns, with role conflict and role ambiguity as sources of stress; status is the rank given to a member.
• Cohesiveness is the degree to which members are attracted to the group; high cohesion raises productivity only when the group's norms support the organisation's goals, and lowers it when they do not.
• Social loafing (the Ringelmann effect) is the tendency to exert less effort in a group than alone; it falls when individual contributions are identifiable.
• Groupthink (Irving Janis, 1972) is the deterioration of judgement in cohesive groups that value unanimity above realistic appraisal, with illusions of invulnerability, self-censorship and mind-guards; group shift is the tendency of group decisions to be more extreme than members' initial positions.
• Sociometry (Jacob Moreno) maps the attractions and rejections among members in a sociogram, revealing stars, isolates and cliques.

Leadership is the ability to influence a group towards the achievement of goals. Trait theories looked for the qualities that distinguish leaders (intelligence, drive, self-confidence, integrity) and found no consistent list. Behavioural theories studied what leaders do. The Iowa studies (Lewin, Lippitt and White, 1939) compared autocratic, democratic and laissez-faire styles. The Ohio State studies found two dimensions, initiating structure (organising the task) and consideration (concern for people's welfare and feelings). The Michigan studies contrasted employee-oriented and production-oriented supervisors and found the former more effective. Robert Blake and Jane Mouton's Managerial Grid (1964) plots concern for production against concern for people on nine-point scales: 1,1 impoverished; 9,1 authority–compliance (task); 1,9 country club; 5,5 middle-of-the-road; and 9,9 team management, which they held to be best. Rensis Likert's four systems run from exploitative–authoritative (System 1) through benevolent–authoritative and consultative to participative group (System 4). Tannenbaum and Schmidt's continuum (1958) runs from boss-centred to subordinate-centred leadership.

Contingency theories fit style to situation. Fred Fiedler's model (1967) measures the leader's style by the least-preferred co-worker (LPC) scale and the situation by leader–member relations, task structure and position power; task-oriented (low-LPC) leaders do best in very favourable and very unfavourable situations, relationship-oriented leaders in moderately favourable ones, and since style is fixed the situation must be changed to fit the leader. Paul Hersey and Kenneth Blanchard's situational leadership matches style to followers' readiness: telling (S1), selling (S2), participating (S3) and delegating (S4). Robert House's path–goal theory (1971) holds that leaders clarify the path to goals by being directive, supportive, participative or achievement-oriented. Vroom and Yetton's normative model (1973) prescribes how far to involve subordinates in a decision. Among newer theories, James MacGregor Burns (1978) and Bernard Bass distinguished transactional leadership (exchange of rewards for effort) from transformational leadership (idealised influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation and individualised consideration); Robert Greenleaf described servant leadership (1970).

Communication is the transfer and understanding of meaning. The process runs from sender through encoding, message, channel, decoding and receiver, with feedback and noise. It flows downward (orders, policies), upward (reports, suggestions, grievances), horizontally and diagonally. Small-group networks were studied by Alex Bavelas and Harold Leavitt: the chain, the wheel (fast and accurate for simple tasks, with a clear leader, but low member satisfaction), the Y, the circle, and the all-channel network (best for complex problems and satisfaction). The grapevine is the informal network; Keith Davis found it fast and, on non-controversial matters, largely accurate, and that the cluster chain (one person tells a few, of whom some pass it on) is its commonest pattern. Barriers include filtering, selective perception, information overload, emotions, language and jargon, status differences and defensiveness.

Power is the capacity to influence the behaviour of others; authority is power that is legitimate, attached to a position and accepted as rightful. John French and Bertram Raven (1959) identified five bases of power: legitimate (from position), reward, coercive, expert and referent (from identification with and admiration for the person); Raven later added informational power. The first three are positional or formal, the last two personal. Max Weber classified legitimate authority as traditional (resting on custom, as of a chief or a hereditary owner), charismatic (resting on devotion to an exceptional person) and rational-legal (resting on rules and office, the basis of bureaucracy). Barnard's acceptance theory, taught in Unit I, locates authority in the consent of those who obey; organisational politics is the use of power outside formal channels.

Stress is the response of a person to a demand (a stressor) that he perceives as exceeding his resources. Hans Selye's general adaptation syndrome has three stages: alarm, resistance and exhaustion; he also distinguished eustress (positive, energising stress) from distress. The Yerkes–Dodson law describes an inverted-U relation between arousal and performance: performance rises with arousal up to an optimum and then falls. Stressors at work are role overload, role conflict and role ambiguity, poor working conditions (noise, heat, shift work), job insecurity, interpersonal conflict, and organisational change; personal factors include family and financial problems and Type A behaviour. Consequences are physiological (blood pressure, heart disease), psychological (anxiety, dissatisfaction, burnout, which Christina Maslach described as emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation and reduced personal accomplishment) and behavioural (absenteeism, accidents, turnover, substance use). Management of stress works at the individual level (time management, exercise, relaxation, counselling) and the organisational level (job redesign, role clarification, participation, employee assistance programmes, wellness programmes).

Organisational change may be planned or unplanned, incremental or transformational, and is driven by technology, competition, law, the workforce and the economy. Kurt Lewin's model has three steps — unfreezing (creating readiness by reducing restraining forces or increasing driving forces), moving and refreezing — and his force-field analysis weighs the forces for and against change. John Kotter's eight steps (Leading Change, 1996) are: establish a sense of urgency, form a guiding coalition, create a vision, communicate it, empower others to act, create short-term wins, consolidate gains, and institutionalise the new approaches. Resistance to change comes from individuals (habit, security, economic fear, fear of the unknown, selective information processing) and from the organisation (structural inertia, group norms, threats to expertise, power and resource allocations); Kotter and Schlesinger (1979) listed six ways of overcoming it: education and communication, participation, facilitation and support, negotiation, manipulation and co-optation, and coercion. Organisation development (OD) is a planned, organisation-wide, top-managed effort, using behavioural-science knowledge and action research, to increase organisational effectiveness and health (Richard Beckhard's definition, 1969); its interventions are listed in the HRD chapter.