This is the fifth release of a work that began in 1984 as Modern Approaches to Understanding and Managing Organizations. We're grateful to readers around the world who have told us the book gave them ideas that make a difference—at work and elsewhere in their lives.
It is time for an update, and we're gratified to be back by popular demand. Like everything else, organizations and their leadership challenges have been changing rapidly in recent years, and scholars have been running hard to keep up. This edition tries to capture the current frontiers of both knowledge and art.
The four-frame model, with its view of organizations as factories, families, jungles, and temples, remains the book's conceptual heart. But much else has changed. We have updated our case examples extensively to keep up with the latest developments in managerial practice. We have updated a feature we inaugurated in the third edition, "greatest hits in organization studies." These features offer pithy summaries of key ideas from the some of the most influential works in the scholarly literature (as indicated by a citation analysis, described in the Appendix at the end of the book). As a counterpoint to the scholarly works, we have also added occasional summaries of recent management best-sellers.
Life in organizations has also produced many new examples, and there is new material throughout the book. At the same time, we worked zealously to minimize bloat by tracking down and expunging every redundant sentence, marginal concept, or extraneous example. We are proud that, despite new material in every chapter, this edition is actually a bit shorter than the last one. At the same time, we've tried to keep it fun. Collective life is an endless source of examples as entertaining as they are instructive, and we've sprinkled them throughout the text. We apologize to anyone who finds that an old favorite fell to the cutting-room floor, but we think most readers will find the book an even clearer and more efficient read.
As always, our primary audience is managers and future leaders. We have tried to answer the question, What do we know about organizations and leadership that is genuinely relevant and useful to practitioners? We have worked to present a large, complex body of theory, research, and practice as clearly and simply as possible. We tried to avoid watering it down or presenting simplistic views of how to solve managerial problems. Our goal is to offer not solutions but powerful and provocative ways of thinking about opportunities and pitfalls.
We continue to focus on both management and leadership. Leading and managing are different, but they're equally important. If an organization is overmanaged but underled, it eventually loses any sense of spirit or purpose. A poorly managed organization with a strong, charismatic leader may soar briefly—only to crash shortly thereafter. Malpractice can be as damaging and unethical for managers and leaders as for physicians. Myopic managers or overzealous leaders usually harm more than just themselves. The challenges of modern organizations require the objective perspective of managers as well as the brilliant flashes of vision that wise leadership provides. We need more people in managerial roles who can find simplicity and order amid organizational confusion and chaos. We need versatile and flexible leaders who are artists as well as analysts, who can reframe experience to discover new issues and possibilities. We need managers who love their work, their organizations, and the people whose lives they affect. We need leaders and managers who appreciate management as a moral and ethical undertaking. We need leaders who combine hard-headed realism with passionate commitment to larger values and purposes. We hope to encourage and nurture such qualities and possibilities.
As in the past, we have tried to produce a clear and readable synthesis and integration of the field's major theoretical traditions. We concentrate mainly on organization theory's implications for practice. We draw on examples from every sector and around the globe. Historically, organization studies have been divided into several intellectual camps, often isolated from one another. Works that seek to give a comprehensive overview of organization theory and research often drown in social science jargon and abstraction and have little to say to practitioners. We try to find a balance between misleading oversimplification and mind-boggling complexity.
The bulk of work in organization theory has focused almost exclusively on either the private or the public sector, but not both. We think this is a mistake. Managers need to understand similarities and differences among all types of organizations. The public and private sectors increasingly interpenetrate one another. Public administrators who regulate airlines, nuclear power plants, or pharmaceutical companies face the problem of "indirect management" every day. They struggle to influence the behavior of organizations over which they have very limited authority. Private firms need to manage relationships with multiple levels of government. The situation is even more complicated for managers in multinational companies coping with the subtleties of governments with very different systems and traditions. Across sectors and cultures, managers often harbor narrow, stereotypic conceptions of one another that impede effectiveness on both sides. We need common ground and a shared understanding that can help strengthen public and private organizations in the United States and throughout the world. The dialogue between public and private, domestic and multinational organizations has become increasingly important. Because of their generic application, the frames offer an ecumenical language for the exchange. Our work with a variety of organizations around the world has continually reinforced our confidence that the frames are relevant everywhere. Political issues, for example, are universally important, even though the specifics vary greatly from one country or culture to another.
The idea of reframing continues to be a central theme. Throughout the book, we show how the same situation can be viewed in at least four ways. In Part Six, we include a series of chapters on reframing critical organizational issues such as leadership, change, and ethics. Two chapters are specifically devoted to reframing real-life situations.
We also continue to emphasize artistry. Overemphasizing the rational and technical side of an organization often contributes to its decline or demise. Our counterbalance emphasizes the importance of art in both management and leadership. Artistry is neither exact nor precise; the artist interprets experience, expressing it in forms that can be felt, understood, and appreciated. Art fosters emotion, subtlety, and ambiguity. An artist represents the world to give us a deeper understanding of what is and what might be. In modern organizations, quality, commitment, and creativity are highly valued but often hard to find. They can be developed and encouraged by leaders or managers who embrace the expressive side of their work.
The first part of the book, "Making Sense of Organizations," tackles a perplexing question about management: Why is it that smart people so often do dumb things? Chapter One "The Power of Reframing," explains why: Managers often misread situations. They have not learned how to use multiple lenses to get a better sense of what they're up against and what they might do. Chapter Two, "Simple Ideas, Complex Organizations," uses several famous cases (9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and a friendly-fire tragedy in the skies over Iraq in 1994) to show how managers' everyday thinking and theories can lead to catastrophe. We explain basic factors that make organizational life complicated, ambiguous, and unpredictable; discuss common fallacies in managerial thinking; and spell out criteria for more effective approaches to diagnosis and action.
Part Two, "The Structural Frame," explores the key role that social architecture plays in the functioning of organizations. Chapter Three, "Getting Organized," describes basic issues managers must consider in designing structure to fit an organization's goals, tasks, and context. It demonstrates why organizations—from Harvard University to McDonald's—need different structures in order to be effective in their unique environments. Chapter Four, "Structure and Restructuring," explains major structural pathologies and pitfalls. It presents guidelines for aligning structures to situations, along with several cases illustrating successful structural change. Chapter Five, "Organizing Groups and Teams," shows that structure is a key to high-performing teams.
Part Three, "The Human Resource Frame," explores the properties of both people and organizations, and what happens when the two intersect. Chapter Six, "People and Organizations," focuses on the relationship between organizations and human nature. It shows how a manager's practices and assumptions about people can lead either to alienation and hostility or to commitment and high motivation. It contrasts two strategies for achieving effectiveness: "lean and mean," or investing in people. Chapter Seven, "Improving Human Resource Management," is an overview of practices that build a more motivated and committed workforce—including participative management, job enrichment, self-managing workgroups, management of diversity, and organization development. Chapter Eight, "Interpersonal and Group Dynamics," presents an example of interpersonal conflict to illustrate how managers can enhance or undermine relationships. It also discusses how group members can increase their effectiveness by attending to group process, including informal norms and roles, interpersonal conflict, leadership, and decision making.
Part Four, "The Political Frame," views organizations as arenas. Individuals and groups compete to achieve their parochial interests in a world of conflicting viewpoints, scarce resources, and struggles for power. Chapter Nine, "Power, Conflict, and Coalition," analyzes the tragic loss of the space shuttles Columbia and Challenger, illustrating the influence of political dynamics in decision making. It shows how scarcity and diversity lead to conflict, bargaining, and games of power; the chapter also distinguishes constructive and destructive political dynamics. Chapter Ten, "The Manager as Politician," illustrates basic skills of the constructive politician: diagnosing political realities, setting agendas, building networks, negotiating, and making choices that are both effective and ethical. Chapter Eleven, "Organizations as Political Arenas and Political Agents," highlights organizations as both arenas for political contests and political actors influencing broader social, political, and economic trends. Case examples such as Wal-Mart and Ross Johnson explore political dynamics both inside and outside organizations.
Part Five explores the symbolic frame. Chapter Twelve, "Organizational Symbols and Culture," spells out basic symbolic elements in organizations: myths, heroes, metaphors, stories, humor, play, rituals, and ceremonies. It defines organizational culture and shows its central role in shaping performance. The power of symbol and culture is illustrated in cases as diverse as Harley-Davidson, the U.S. Congress, Nordstrom department stores, the Air Force, and an odd horse race in Italy. Chapter Thirteen, "Culture in Action," uses the case of a computer development team to show what leaders and group members can do collectively to build a culture that bonds people in pursuit of a shared mission. Initiation rituals, specialized language, group stories, humor and play, and ceremonies all combine to transform diverse individuals into a cohesive team with purpose, spirit, and soul. Chapter Fourteen, "Organization as Theater," draws on dramaturgical and institutional theory to reveal how organizational structures, activities, and events serve as secular dramas, expressing our fears and joys, arousing our emotions, and kindling our spirit. It also shows how organizational structures and processes, such as planning, evaluation, and decision making, are often more important for what they express than for what they accomplish.
Part Six, "Improving Leadership Practice," focuses on the implications of the frames for central issues in managerial practice, including leadership, change, and ethics. Chapter Fifteen, "Integrating Frames for Effective Practice," shows how managers can blend the frames to improve their effectiveness. It looks at organizations as multiple realities and gives guidelines for aligning frames with situations. Chapter Sixteen, "Reframing in Action," presents four scenarios, or scripts, derived from the frames. It applies the scenarios to the harrowing experience of a young manager whose first day in a new job turns out to be far more challenging than she expected. The discussion illustrates how leaders can expand their options and enhance their effectiveness by considering alternative approaches. Chapter Seventeen, "Reframing Leadership," discusses limitations in traditional views of leadership and proposes a more comprehensive view of how leadership works in organizations. It summarizes and critiques current knowledge on the characteristics of leaders, including the relationship of leadership and gender. It shows how frames generate distinctive images of effective leaders as architects, servants, advocates, and prophets.
Chapter Eighteen, "Reframing Change in Organizations," describes four fundamental issues that arise in any change effort: individual needs, structural alignment, political conflict, and existential loss. It uses cases of successful and unsuccessful change to document key strategies, such as training, realigning, creating arenas, and using symbol and ceremony. Chapter Nineteen, "Reframing Ethics and Spirit," discusses four ethical mandates that emerge from the frames: excellence, caring, justice, and faith. It argues that leaders can build more ethical organizations through gifts of authorship, love, power, and significance. Chapter Twenty, "Bringing It All Together," is an integrative treatment of the reframing process. It takes a troubled school administrator through a weekend of reflection on critical difficulties he faces. The chapter shows how reframing can help managers move from feeling confused and stuck to discovering a renewed sense of clarity and confidence. The Epilogue (Chapter Twenty-One) describes strategies and characteristics needed in future leaders. It explains why they will need an artistic combination of conceptual flexibility and commitment to core values. Efforts to prepare future leaders have to focus as much on spiritual as on intellectual development.
As we noted in our first edition, "Book writing often feels like a lonely process, even when an odd couple is doing the writing." This odd couple keeps getting older (both closing in on seventy)—and, some would say, even odder and more grumpy. Yet the process seems less lonely because of our close friendship and our contact with many other colleagues and friends. The best thing about teaching is that you learn so much from your students. Students at Harvard, Vanderbilt, the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and the University of Southern California have given us invaluable criticism, challenge, and support over the years. We're grateful to the many readers who have responded to our invitation to write and ask questions or share comments. Their input has made the book better in many ways. (The invitation is still open—our contact information is in "The Authors" section.) We wish we could personally thank all of the leaders and managers from whose experience we have profited in seminars, workshops, and consultations. Their knowledge and wisdom are the foundation and touchstone for our work.
As in the past, we owe much to our colleagues. Thanks again to all who helped us in the prior editions; your contribution still lingers in this work. But we particularly want to mention those who have made more recent contributions.
We have learned much from collaboration with a number of teaching fellows and graduate assistants at the University of Missouri—Kansas City; in particular, we are very grateful for the help of Mary Yung, Hooilin Chan, Vera Stoykova, and Zhou Yongjie. They all did an outstanding job helping us develop the citation analysis that appears in the Appendix, and Vera did excellent work on developing a test bank.
We wish we could thank all the colleagues and readers in the United States and around the world who have offered valuable comments and suggestions, but the list is long and our memories keep getting shorter. Elena Granell de Aldaz of the Institute for Advanced Study of Management in Caracas collaborated with us on developing a Spanish-language adaptation of Reframing Organizations as well as on a more recent project that studied frame orientations among managers in Venezuela. We are proud to consider her a valued colleague and wonderful friend. Bob Marx, of the University of Massachusetts, deserves special mention as a charter member of the frames family. Bob's interest in the frames, creativity in developing teaching designs, and eye for video material have aided our thinking and teaching immensely. Cdr. Gary Deal, USN; Maj. Kevin Reed, USAF; Dr. Peter Minich, a transplant surgeon; and Jan and Ron Haynes of FzioMed all provided valuable case material. The late Peter Frost of the University of British Columbia continues to inspire our work. Peter Vaill of the Antioch Graduate School has been a continuing source of ideas, support, and inspiration. Kent Peterson, University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Sharon Conley, University of California at Santa Barbara, are continuing sources of ideas and support. A number of individuals, including many friends and colleagues at the Organizational Behavior Teaching Conference, have given us helpful ideas and suggestions. We apologize for any omissions, but we want to thank Anke Arnaud, Carole K. Barnett, Max Elden, Kent Fairfield, Olivier Hermanus, Jim Hodge, Earlene Holland, Scott Johnson, Mark Kriger, Larry Levine, Hyoungbae Lee, Mark Maier, Magid Mazen, Thomas P. Nydegger, Dave O'Connell, Lynda St. Clair, Susan Twombly, and Pat Villeneuve. We only wish we had succeeded in implementing all the wonderful ideas we received from these and other colleagues.
Bill Eddy, dean emeritus of the Bloch School at the University of Missouri—Kansas City, gets special thanks for nurturing an environment that helps scholarship flourish. His successors on the leadership team at the Bloch School, including Al Page, Homer Erekson, Karyl Leggio and Lanny Solomon, have kept that tradition alive. Other current or former Bloch School colleagues who have helped more than they know are Dave Bodde, Nancy Day, Dick Heimovics, Bob Herman, Doranne Hudson, Deborah Noble, Stephen Pruitt, David Renz, Beth Smith, and Marilyn Taylor. Lee's colleagues in the Department of Organization, Leadership, and Marketing at the Bloch School have done their part, and he is grateful to Raj Arora, Gene Brown, Rita Cain, Pam Dobies, Mark Parry, Michael Song, and Rob Waris. Colleagues Carl Cohn, Stu Gothald, and Gib Hentschke of the University of Southern California offer both intellectual stimulation and moral support.
Others to whom our debt is particularly clear are Chris Argyris, Sam Bacharach, Cliff Baden, Estella Bensimon, Margaret Benefiel, Bob Birnbaum, Barbara Bunker, Tom Burks, Ellen Castro, Norma Saba Corey, Carlos Cortés, Linton Deck, Jim Honan, Tom Johnson (always a source of creative ideas), Bob Kegan, Grady McGonagill, Judy McLaughlin, John Meyer, Harrison Owen, Michael Sales, Dick Scott, Joan Vydra, Roy Williams, and Karl Weick. Thanks again to Dave Brown, Phil Mirvis, Barry Oshry, Tim Hall, Bill Kahn, and Todd Jick of the Brookline Circle, now in its third decade of searching for joy and meaning in lives devoted to the study of organizations.
Outside the United States, we are grateful to Poul Erik Mouritzen in Denmark; Rolf Kaelin, Cüno Pumpin, and Peter Weisman in Switzerland; Ilpo Linko in Finland; Tom Case in Brazil; Einar Plyhn and Haakon Gran in Norway; Peter Normark and Dag Bjorkegren in Sweden; Ching-Shiun Chung in Taiwan; Anastasia Vitkovskaya in Russia; and H.R.H. Prince Philipp von und zu Lichtenstein.
Closer to home, Lee is very grateful to physical therapist Scott Knoche, whose intervention in a debilitating case of cervical radiculopathy produced near-miraculous results. Lee also owes more than he can say to Bruce Kay, whose genial and unflappable approach to work, coupled with high levels of organization and follow-through, have all had a wonderfully positive impact since he took on the challenge of bringing a modicum of order and sanity to Lee's professional functioning. We also continue to be grateful for the long-term support and friendship of Linda Corey, who still serves as our resident representative at Harvard, and Homa Aminmadani, who now lives part-time in Teheran.
Couples of the Edna Ranch Vintners Guild—the Schnackenbergs, Pescatores, Hayneses, and Beadles—link efforts with Terry in exploring the ups, downs, and mysteries of the art and science of wine making. Three professional wine makers, Bob Schiebelhut of Tolosa, Romeo "Meo" Zuech of Piedra Creek Winery, and Brett Escalera of Consilience and TresAnelli, offer advice that applies to leadership as well as wine making. Meo reminds us, "Never overmanage your grapes," and Brett prefaces answers to all questions with "It all depends."
We're delighted to be well into the third decade of our partnership with Jossey-Bass. We're grateful to the many friends who have helped us over the years, including Bill Henry, Steve Piersanti, Lynn Lychow, Bill Hicks, Debra Hunter, Cedric Crocker, Byron Schneider, and many others. In recent years, Kathe Sweeney has been a wonderful editor and even better friend, and we're delighted to be working with her again. Rob Brandt has done superb work keeping us organized enough for the editorial process to move forward. Beverly Peavler's keen eye, editorial judgment, and willingness to crack the whip gently have made for a much stronger manuscript.
We received many valuable suggestions from a diverse, knowledgeable, and talented team of outside reviewers: Hannah Carter (University of Florida), Matthew Eriksen (University of Tampa), James "Jae" Espey (Clemson), Chris Foley (University of Pennsylvania), Frank Hamilton (Eckerd College), Robert "Bob" Innes (Vanderbilt), and Kristi Loescher (University of Texas, Austin). We did not succeed in implementing all of their many excellent ideas, and they did not always agree among themselves, but the manuscript benefited in many ways from their input.
Lee's six children—Edward, Shelley, Lori, Scott, Christopher, and Bradley—all continue to enrich his life and contribute to his growth. He still wishes he could give them as much as they have given him. Brad has become a creative source of new ways to think about reframing, and Chris served as our consultant on contemporary music. Janie Deal Rice has delighted her father in becoming a fascinating and independent entrepreneur, running (with husband Jake, also mayor of Hagerman, Idaho) a catering business and bed and breakfast, Ein Tisch Inn. Janie has a rare talent of almost magically transforming simple ingredients into fine cuisine. Special mention also goes to Terry's parents, Bob and Dorothy Deal. His father is deceased and his mother is now in her nineties, but both lived long enough to be pleasantly surprised that their oft-wayward son could write a book.
We dedicate the book to our wives, who have more than earned all the credit and appreciation that we can give them. Joan Gallos, Lee's spouse and closest colleague, combines intellectual challenge and critique with support and love. She has been an active collaborator in developing our ideas, and her teaching manual for previous editions was a frame-breaking model for the genre. Her contributions have become so integrated into our own thinking that we are no longer able to thank her for all the ways that the book has gained from her wisdom and insights.
Sandy Deal's psychological training enables her to approach the field of organizations with a distinctive and illuminating slant. Her successful practice produces examples that have helped us make some even stronger connections to the concepts of clinical psychology. She is one of the most gifted diagnosticians in the field, as well as a delightful partner whose love and support over the long run have made all the difference. She is a rare combination of courage and caring, intimacy and independence, responsibility and playfulness.
To Joan and Sandy, thanks again. As the years accumulate, we love you even more.
June 2008
Lee G. Bolman
Kansas City, Missouri
Terrence E. Deal
San Luis Obispo, California