Organizational Development: A Manual for Managers and ... - FPDL

Character of an organization
Structure determines the emergent features of an organization. But the behaviour of an
organization cannot be fully determined by its structure. Substructural aspects and relations will
also play a very important role. Certain parts of the substructure of an organization may remain
more or less the same over time. Then certain regularities in behaviour caused by these
substructural elements, or differences in behaviours of different organizations that have seemingly
the same structures, may be observed. Thus, organizations, due to their substructures, obtain a
kind of specific character or ‘personality’.
Talk about organizational climate, organizational environment, or organizational behaviour are
quite usual. But discussing organizational personality is something new, although quite natural.
The next step after recognizing an organization as a living organism is recognition of a certain
collective brain and a kind of organizational intelligence (see, for example, Childre and Cryer,
1999). So, why not character?
William Bridges goes as far as dividing organizations into 16 types in accordance with Carl Jung’s
classification of psychological types based on dichotomies ‘extraversion or introversion’, ‘sensing
or intuition’, ‘thinking or feeling’, and ‘judging or perceiving’. In his book ‘Character of Organization:
Using Personality Type in Organization Development’ one can find even an Organizational
Character Index that was developed as an experimental tool for working with organizations. As the
author pointed out in this book,”as long as it is used critically, the analogy between the
organization and the individual permits us to understand and discuss certain things about
organizations that would otherwise remain obscure and difficult to articulate. Specifically, it enables
us to understand why organizations act as they do and why they are so very hard to change in any
fundamental way. “(W.Bridges, 2000).
Applying Bridge’s classification looks a bit risky because in the case of individual human behaviour
those dichotomies refer to a set number of specific types of personality, diagnosed though genetic
and physiologic reasoning, and in the case of organizations this number more likely will be infinite.
However, recognizing and analyzing organizational character is a good step forward. At the end of
the day, if organizations did not have a character, how it would be possible to improve their
character?
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