„‚ CONDITIONS THAT HINDER EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION

epulsion. Groups become cohesive when their activities strengthen the individual
person’s chances to achieve his or her own goals. In time certain standards develop in
any group, and each member expects the others to conform to group standards. What is
important is not how similar or dissimilar a group’s members are but how dynamically
interdependent they are: a group can be a “Gestalt”—a whole containing dissimilar
parts. However, a person is more often apt to be a member of a group to whose members
he feels similar or wishes to be similar.
Belonging is signified by adherence to a group code: those who belong obey. In this
way group pressure regulates the conduct of possibly deviant group members. For a
member to change his or her behavior or point of view independently of the group
would get that person into trouble with his or her fellow group members; as a
consequence, this rarely takes place (Marrow, 1977).
At the top of Figure 1 is a large bracket displaying the range of the dominantminority
group mode of analysis. This means that all of the concepts of social
interaction below it are potentially applicable to the analysis of power and interpersonal
relations among members of dominant groups and minority groups in any society. Many
OD practitioners work with organizations on problems of institutional racism, equal
employment opportunity and affirmative action, and upward mobility for women and
minority-group members. These experiences prompt facilitators to work on problems
related to the integration/isolation, openness/closedness, and crescive/enacted continua
as well as problems of organizational solidarity, consensus, and work culture. Although
some observers might remark wryly that such OD facilitators are working on problems
beyond their professional purview, Figure 1 suggests that, to the contrary, they are very
much on familiar intellectual turf.
INDIVIDUAL BEHAVIOR AND SPECIFIC BEHAVIORAL CONTENT
Organization development facilitators, by and large, avoid individual therapy, amateur
psychologizing, and the analysis of there-and-then behavior; consequently, no attention
is given to individual psychology as a traditional field of study or basic social science in
the behavioral-science configuration. Thus, it may appear strange that OD facilitators
think they can change human institutions when they intervene in organizations by using
action-research models or seminars/workshops that involve groups or teams but ignore
individual people as such. Yet this bypass is common; T-groups, encounter groups, and
Gestalt groups, with their personal, individual orientations, are seldom used today in
OD.
The specific behavioral content that can be abstracted from social interaction and
that forms some of the intellectual content of the less-behavioral social sciences, such as
economics and political science, is also of little direct interest to OD facilitators.
Specific behavioral content is often analyzed institutionally and becomes the content and
subject matter of many of the disciplines and subdisciplines taught in universities today,
such as education, religion, medicine, science, law, and the like.
The Pfeiffer Library Volume 6, 2nd Edition. Copyright ©1998 Jossey-Bass/Pfeiffer ❚❘ 383