It has been said that management theory is a series of footnotes to Drucker. It might be said with equal truth that the study of group dynamics and organisational behaviour is a set of footnotes to Kurt Lewin (1890 – 1947) - known as the father of modern social psychology. He was the first to use scientific methods and experimentation to study social behaviour.

His study of groups led to the understanding that the process of group interaction was just as important as and indeed an integral part of any outcomes. This is now a vital part of facilitation processes.

Field theory 

Lewin is perhaps most renowned for his development of ‘field theory’ - that human behavior is the function of both the person and the environment. Obvious as this may seem to us now, psychologists at the time accepted the psychoanalytic theory that all human action was the result of blind pushes from within the self. Lewin thought of motives as goal-directed forces.

Our behaviour is purposeful; we live in a psychological reality or life space that includes not only those parts of our physical and social environment that are important to us but also imagined states that do not currently exist.

Lewin's field theory is essentially the demonstration that behaviour is the result of a combination of personality and social situation - and that neither study of the individual not study of the social environment will be enough to account for, or indeed predict, behaviour on their own. This 'nature or nurture' argument has long been current in social psychology and has perhaps been given further impetus by breakthrough learning about the nature and function of parts of the human brain. One might include the work of Simon Baron-Cohen here as an example.

Action research

Lewin’s field theory lead to his developing action research.

The research needed for social practice can best be characterized as research for social management or social engineering. It is a type of action-research, a comparative research on the conditions and effects of various forms of social action, and research leading to social action. Research that produces nothing but books will not suffice.

From this quotation, it can be seen that action research is aimed at improving practice - that it is a matter of the practitioner acting, collecting data on the results, reflecting on alternatives, seeking improvement and then acting again. At its very centre is the collection and analysis of hard data. It has been described as:

... inquiry or research in the context of focused efforts to improve the quality of an organization and its performance. It typically is designed and conducted by practitioners who analyze the data to improve their own practice. Action research can be done by individuals or by teams of colleagues. The team approach is called collaborative inquiry.

Unfreeze, change, refreeze

Part of Action research is the three step model of change in organisationa development - unfreeze, change, refreeze. The central concept is that an organisation needs to be shaken out of its current values and mode of operation first, then changed and then set running in its new mode with new values. Today, many thinkers would argue that refreezing is not a good idea and that change is constant.

Group dynamics 

Action research was part and parcel of Lewin's deep interest in the working of social groups. In 1944, he established the Research Center on Group Dynamics at Massachusetts's Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) with a programme to study:

• Group productivity – seeking to understand why groups are so often unable to get results.
• Communication – seeking to understand how influence works in groups
• Social perception – seeking to discover how group membership affects perception of perceived social events
• Intergroup relations – seeking to identify what helps and hinders relationships between groups
• Group membership – seeking the way in which individuals adjust their behaviour to fit in with different groups
• Leadership training – seeking ways top enable managers to lead groups more effectively

He said of groups that they existed for two reasons. A group’s existence continues for as long as:

• people in it realize their fate depends on the fate of the group as a whole
• members of the group are dependent on each other for achievement

He worked with Ronald Lippitton a study of three group models - democratic, autocratic and laissez-faire – and concluded that there was more originality, group-mindedness and friendliness in democratic groups. In contrast, there was more aggression, hostility, scapegoating and discontent in laissez-faire and autocratic groups.

T- groups

Lewin was also party to, indeed leader of, the development of what became known as T-groups at the National Training Laboratory in Bethel, Maine.

As well as ...

• Made popular in recent times by David A Kolb, Lewin put forward a model of human learning - action, reflection, generalization, and testing. This may find an echo in Tom Peter's later comment, 'Try it. Do it. Fix it.'  and indeed is central to Action Research.
• Lewin was the first to make use of the word feedback, taken from electronic engineering.

Taken from our Managememt Training Academy

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Carl Rogers says

"Active Listening is an important way to bring about changes in people ... clinical and research evidence clearly shows that sensitive listening is a most effective agent for individual personality change and group development."

He also says that when people are listened to in this way, they listen to themselves more acutely and that active listening reduces barriers and differences between people.

Norman Maier shows in his research that this skill is, unfortunately, not common among managers.The best sales people are the best listeners.  They get the best information, isolate the best priorities, most accurately identify concerns, worries and needs and are thereby enabled to put forward the most customised and most acceptable propositions.

Article taken from our online Development Academy. For more information visit our website.

Cohesive groups share the same values. Non-conforming members are usually isolated. Reference groups are those that matter to individuals, who are used by an individual to evaluate his or her own performance.

Group behaviour is very powerful and managers who ignore it will have greater difficulty in motivating people and installing change. In fact, the effective manager knows that the group standards, which can be raised slowly and steadily, can do much of the managing. People will work harder to remain accepted by a group which they admire or respect.

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Reddin’s model was based on the two basic dimensions of leadership identified by the Ohio State studies. He called them Task-orientation and Relationships-orientation. However he introduced what he called a third dimension – Effectiveness. Effectiveness was what resulted when one used the right style of leadership for the particular situation.

Reddin, like Blake, identified four major leadership styles on the high effectiveness plane and four corresponding styles on the low effectiveness plane, effectiveness being where the leadership style matched the demands of the situation. So a manager who demonstrated a high level of task-orientation and low relationships orientation (equivalent to Blake’s 9,1) where it was the style that was required was called a Benevolent Autocrat while a manager who applied that style of behaviour where the situation did not call for it was labelled an Autocrat.

The real theoretical breakthrough with Reddin’s 3-D model was the idea that one could assess the situation and identify what behaviour was most appropriate. (Effective Situational Diagnosis, W. J. Reddin and R. Stuart-Kotze, MEL, London, 1972.)

Taken from our Online Development Academy

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What are the implications for management training in the UK over the next 6 months? Well in our experience clients are still being cautious but the last quarter for us showed an up turn not just in the number of enquiries but also the actual number of bookings. This has to be positive going into 2010 given the extremely nervous start many companies had to 2009.

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Hersey and Blanchard’s model is still widely used. It is simple to apply and easy to understand. Ken Blanchard is a very nice chap and is very bright and creative. (You may recall that he wrote The One Minute Manager, and an old publishing colleague of mine just told me that Ken sent him an autographed copy of the 7 millionth copy as thanks for his help in publishing his books!)

There really wasn’t a breakthrough with Hersey and Blanchard, but they did bring the idea of the importance of the situation to the attention of practitioners and consultants in leadership.

Taken from our Online Development Academy

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What is brainstorming?

It is a technique - or rather a collection of techniques - which aim to enable a group of people to come up with new ideas on a question and to reach agreement on which are the best. It is practised in many ways - from the complex to the simple. The most complex use that I have seen was in Hamburg, in Germany, where a group of highly trained facilitators used a number of moveable boards, covered in brown paper that could be removed, stored and re-posted and on which an array of sticky cards in different shapes and colours could be mounted. It was extremely impressive to watch the way that the facilitators worked the flow of ideas, categorising, prompting and drawing our conclusions from a fairly large group of people.

In its more simple form, brainstorming is a process involving a group of people with one other person acting as facilitator/scribe. Members of the group call out ideas and the 'scribe' writes them down on flip charts. The rules are set such that no one is allowed to make a negative comment about an idea. "That won't work," is not allowed. Building on an idea is encouraged. "That's a good idea and it makes me think that (a related idea) might work as well."

The group works at producing new ideas until they run out of steam. At this point, the group is faced with an array of ideas written on probably several sheets of flip chart paper. A simple way of handling this array is to ask the members of the group each to list what they consider to be the best ten ideas. The facilitator then puts a mark against each idea that is in someone's 'top ten' and the ideas that receive the most 'votes' are chosen for action.

There is little doubt that any group, with an expert facilitator, will come up with a range of ideas, provided that the problem is relevant to their skills, knowledge and experience. However, Adrian Furnham (writing in Business Strategy Review, 2000) says that his study of brainstorming shows that such groups in fact come up with fewer and less good ideas than individuals working on their own.

What does it work for?

The real question is that of the objective of running a brainstorming session. There is little doubt that the highest creativity is achieved by individuals. Einstein, Picasso and Shakespeare did not, as far as we know, work in committee. However, there is a world of difference between creativity and implementation. Great painters and even scientists have little problem with implementation. The picture or the scientific paper are ends in themselves. (It may be that Shakespeare had more of a problem in that he had to persuade the actors and the director that the play would be a success but then we know very little about his life as such.)

Frequently in business, and even in quasi-business or social life, it is less the idea and more the fact that a group of people are willing to implement it that is important. Brainstorming at least enables a group of people to feel that they have contributed, that their ideas have been heard and considered, that they themselves have seen a number of ideas different from their own and that they have participated in the choice of a solution. In such circumstances, people are more likely to be willing to support 'their' chosen solution than one which has been imposed from the outside, even via a very creative person.

Right or supported

Like many things in management, the answer is probably situational. If the correctness or true originality of the solution is paramount, then brainstorming is probably not the best solution. Indeed, groups are probably innately conservative and will probably initially applaud and then reject truly original ideas. However, if support from the group to ensure implementation is the most important aspect, then brainstorming does seem to have benefits. In this way, the choice is rather like Roskin's analysis of decision making strategies

This is taken from our online Development Academy.

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Leadership is usually taken to mean change. The leader is not content with what appears satisfactory today. The leader is constantly seeking better and better results. Tom Peters has said that the old saying "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!" no longer applies. Everything can be improved so "Fix it anyway!" Leaders have visions of what is possible - and they achieve these visions in different ways. Some inspire followers. Others invest in teaching people. Still others see and create a system that people can live within.

Professor Robin Stuart-Kotze, in his recent research, distinguishes leadership from stewardship. Leadership, he says, is about change, about seeking to create the conditions in which people will perform to ever higher standards, to change the company constantly, to compete in an ever-changing world. Stewardship, which we might think of as ordinary management, is about control, maintaining the status quo, keeping things going, and doing the best one can with what one has got.

Thus, leadership is generally taken as having a creative aspect while management (or stewardship) as having a controlling aspect.

In history, great leaders have achieved things that ordinary mortals would have felt were not even worth trying - Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Bismark, Churchill, Martin Luther King, Simon Bolivar, Lincoln, Mao Tse Tung. Each of these leaders had different approaches. For example, Napoleon is usually thought of as a military leader, inspiring his men. However, his monument to the world is really the system of laws and civil management that he installed in France, and which has been exported to many parts of the world.

Taken from our online Development Academy.

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• democratic
• autocratic
• laissez-faire

and concluded that there was more originality, group-mindedness and friendliness in democratic groups. In contrast, there was more aggression, hostility, scapegoating and discontent in laissez-faire and autocratic groups.

As we say in the Delegation Profile exercise:

The best management style depends upon the situation that the manager is in. The nature of the staff forms a major part of the situation. For example, the more experienced the staff are, the less the manager has to tell them what to do and the more he or she can delegate.

Delegation is not the ideal style in all circumstances. It depends upon the situation. However, the more you can approach delegation, the more effective your team will be.

Start by reviewing  Theory X and Y and on Participation This will give you some background thinking on management style. Try to overcome any naive beliefs that the manager has to be a tough boss and make all the decisions. Don't let your ego get in the way of your effectiveness.

Think about your team. Are your staff experienced, confident, learning, apprehensive or what?  It is probable that each member of the team will differ – and so will the most appropriate style to use with each team member. Make notes of your conclusions and discuss them with each member of the team in turn. Agree with each team member which style of management will most help them.

Remember also that people develop and that it is your job to help them develop. Reading the short book The One Minute Manager will help. You might consider buying a copy for each member of the team so that they can fully appreciate what you are trying to do with your management style.

Extract taken from our Online Development Academy

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