Organizational Theory

Leaders today face unprecedented levels of environmental complexity (“ Complexity refers to the number and diversity of the elements in an environment” [Hatch 1997,89, emphasis in original].) Social forces and organizations have multiplied and diversified at an astonishing rate between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries (Huntington 1968), through the industrial age to the information age. Our communities, as a result, have become more complex; any one community member may simultaneously belong to a number of diverse organizations. At the most intimate level, individual organizations are populated by diverse and complex people, creating complex, adaptive systems that attempt to cope with the uncertainty of functioning in a more complex society.

If our organizations are complex, understanding and exercising leadership within them must also be more complex. The organizational problems and challenges that leaders face are not always as easily definable and resolvable as in less complex times; understanding organizational theory will help frame leadership decisions. However, Bolman and Deal (1997) note that framing problems and decisions with only one theory will be “incomplete and oversimplified” because surprises, complexities, and ambiguities of organizational life require more powerful and more comprehensive approaches. Determining what is really going on requires more sophisticated lenses than many managers currently possess. It also requires the flexibility to look at organizations from more than one angle (33).

Although our individual and organizational behavior is guided by theory, it is often implicit. By making our underlying assumptions or our theoriesin-use explicit, we will be better able to understand our behavior. And, applying these multiple theories (or “lenses”) helps us to look at organizations from different perspectives and thereby tackle the types of problems facing leaders in such complex organizations.

This entry explains adaptive leadership through the lens of organization theory. Ronald Heifetz (1994) uses the term adaptive work to describe the leadership required to resolve problems in complex situations. Heifetz's delineation of the types of problems that exist in complex organizations is briefly explained. (The typology provided is found in Heifetz's [1994] Leadership without Easy Answers. Similar typologies can be found in the writings of Talcott Parsons and James Thompson [see Shafritz and Ott 2001]).