Ob Concepts

The New Organization and Three Lenses

Understand why we are using the 3 lenses approach in this class:

Expand our personal schemas (sine there’re so many drawbacks and limits within our own perspective), weave together colorful strands from different social science disciplines: each perspective embodies certain assumptions about human nature, about the meaning of organizing, about the relative power of different actors, and about how to collect and analyze data.

Explain the tension between organizational rationality and leadership:

Organizational rationality favors structure, rules, efficiency, by is no longer reasonable in the new organization. Leadership within an organization needs passion, creativity, and other characteristics that seem counterintuitive to organizational rationality.

Explain how schemas help us and lead us astray:

Schemas help people function in cognitively efficient ways. As certain kinds of situations or data become familiar, it’s easier to rely on a tried and true model of how to react than to rethink the situation anew.

It’s particularly helpful the develop schemas about organizations in which we work. It is the essence of becoming an “old hand.” The value of employees with seniority is that they have worked out a number of their own unwritten schemas for how to get things done. Without schemas, every task would be a monumental new project.

This cognitive processing is helpful because it helps individuals find recurring patterns in complex everyday data.

Schemas become outdated: people can be stubbornly attached to their schemas.

Schemas are resistant to change: it may be enough to have a schema that works out pretty well on average. It more often comes from people’s reluctance to give up their comfortable old approaches.

Schemas become universal rules: much of organizational life is not universal, but instead is contingent. What you do depends on some more specific, distinguishing information about the situation....