Chester Bernard's Informal Organizations

Chester Bernard's work "Informal Organizations and their Relation to Formal Organizations," is a classic piece in public administration literature. Discuss the relevancy of this work in today's public/nonprofit agency. What should the public/nonprofit agency leader take from this work when managing a diverse workforce?

Chester I. Bernard was an American business executive, public administrator, and the author of pioneering work in management theory and organizational studies. In 1938 he wrote The Functions of the Executive in which he highlights a theory of organization and the functions of executives in organizations. This became his landmark piece which is still used in academia today.

Part of that piece a chapter titled “Informal Organizations and their Relation to Formal Organizations” discusses just that. Our Shafritz and Hyde (2012) text shows us that Bernard describes informal organizations as “the aggregate of the personal contacts and interactions associated groupings of people that I have just described. Though common or joint purposes are excluded by definition, common or joint results of important character nevertheless come from such organization” (p. 95). The text goes on to show Bernard as saying, “informal organization is indefinite and rather structureless, and has no definite subdivision” (p. 95).

The informal organization helps to complement the more structured formal organization. Some reasons for its importance include accelerating and enhancing responses to unanticipated events, fostering innovation, enabling people to solve problems that require collaboration that does not flow top down.

Jon Katzenbach, senior vice president of Booz & Company and coauthor of Leading Outside the Lines: How to Mobilize the (in)Formal Organization, Energize Your Team, and Get Better Results shows us the relationship that Bernard talks about when he states “The informal organization is a very useful and potentially powerful supplement to the formal”...