Chapter 6 --  The Jossey-Bass Reader on Educational Leadership
"People and Organizations"

The structural perspective focuses on the way that structure develops in response to an organization's tasks and environment.

The human resource frame draws on research built around the following assumptions:

1. Organizations exist to serve human needs
2. Organizations and people need each other
3. When the fit between the individual and the organization is poor, one or both will suffer
4. A good fit between individual and organization benefits both

Human Needs

The idea that people have needs is a central element in commonsense psychology.

Human needs can be defined as conditions or elements in the environment that allow people to survive and develop.

Nature-nurture controversy-  nature argues that human behavior is determined by biological and genetic factors.  nurture- argues human behavior is determined be learning and experience.

A consensus is emerging in the social sciences that human behavior results from the interaction between heredity and environment.

People are more likely to learn things that are relevant to their needs than things that are irrelevant.

What Needs Do People Have?

Maslow grouped human needs into five basic categories arranged in a hierarchy from lowest to highest.  Higher needs take precedence only after lower needs have been satisfied.

1. Physiological needs
2. Safety needs
3. Belongingness and love needs
4. Needs for self esteem
5. Needs for self-actualization

Theory X indicates that managers need to direct and control the work of subordinates who are passive and lazy, have little ambition, prefer to be led and resist change.

Theory Y argues that people are not passive or indifferent by nature but they sometimes become so as a result of their experience in organizations.  the essential task of management is to arrange organizational conditions so that people can achieve their own goals best by directing their efforts toward organizational rewards.

Personality and Organization

Chris Argyris saw a basic conflict between the human personality and the ways that organizations were structured and managed.

People develop from low levels of self-awareness and self-control to higher levels of both.  Argyris proposed that all individuals are predisposed to move from the infant toward the adult ends of all these criteria.

Argyris saw conflict between individuals and organizations because organizations often treat people like children.

Task specialization requires a chain of command to coordinate the work of all the people who are doing narrowly specialized jobs.

Employees can be expected to find ways to resist or adapt to the frustration that organizations create by:

• withdrawing from the organization
• staying on the job but withdrawing psychologically
• resisting the organization by restricting output
• trying to climb the hierarchy to better jobs
• creating groups and organizations that try to redress the power imbalance between person and system
• socializing their children to believe that work is unrewarding and that hopes for advancement are slim

Argyris described three strategies that managers typically use that make the problem worse:

1. Strong dynamic leadership
2. Install tighter controls
3. Human relations programs

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