Chris Argyris: Personality and Organization

Up to this point the emphasis has been on creating a framework for analysis to begin to understand why people behave the way they do in on-going organizations. Although the framework and the understanding it provides are far from complete, a first step has been taken towards a theory of organizational behavior. The framework begins with the assumption that organizational behavior develops from the interaction of the individual and the formal organization. An analysis of the basic properties of relatively mature¹ human beings and formal organization leads to the conclusion that there is an inherent incongruency between the self-actualization of the two. This basic incongruency creates a situation of conflict, frustration, and failure for the participants. The conflict, frustration, and failure is hypothesized to increase as the individual increases in degree of maturity and/or as he becomes increasingly subordinate along the chain of command and/or as his immediate work environment becomes increasingly specialized. The individual may adapt to the conflict, frustration, and failure by leaving, climbing the organizational ladder, be coming apathetic, disinterested, and noninvolved, by creating informal groups which develop into formal trade unions, by accepting dissatisfaction as inevitable, and consequently increasing his desire for money and decreasing his desire for human rewards, and finally by acculturating his children with these adaptive informal activities. Management, as agents of the formal organization, react to these adaptive informal activities by increasing the degree of directive technically competent leadership, clarifying, redefining, and unintentionally rigidifying the formal structure, increasing and tightening management controls, and finally developing "information," "education," "communication" and "human relations" programs. These management reactions tend to "compound the felony" of the formal organizational structure. Instead of reducing the basic cause of the human problems, they tend to perpetuate the original ones and create new ones.