Barbara Benedict Bunker

Ideas in Currency and OD Practice: Has the Well Gone Dry?

The separation between theory and practice in organization development (OD) has widened over the years. This causes the field of OD to be susceptible to fads rather than having productive conversations with researchers about newideas that can be translated into new methods. This article identifies the following six areas of research with potential to create new practices in OD: virtual teams, conflict resolution, work group effectiveness, social network analysis, trust, and intractable conflict. Each area is described and its ease of application to practice assessed. Then, the process by which new methods have been adopted in the field over the past 15 years is reviewed. The article concludes with a discussion of the need to overcome the gap between the two separate worlds of research and practice in the interest of stimulating innovation.

Introduction to the Special Issue on Large Group Interventions

Twelve years ago, as practitioners were just beginning to work with and create new methods for gathering whole systems in one place to plan and make decisions, we edited a special issue of this journal to present the range of practice that was emerging (Bunker & Alban, 1992). Before 1992, individual practitioners were engaged in a variety of innovative practices, but there was no sense that a whole area of practice was developing. After the special issue, many new developments occurred that created and established large group methods as a new way to create organizational change at the systems level (Bunker & Alban, 1997; Bunker, Alban, & Lewicki, 2004). Now, 12 years later, we have entered a new stage. We agreed to edit this special issue in the hope that both we and our readers would learn more about the state of this practice as it moves from being new and innovative to being established and a part of the methods of many practitioners. We issued a Call for Papers, not knowing whether the response would allow us to create a worthwhile special issue. We are more than gratified by the response. Fifty people volunteered to write articles, and almost 30 delivered them. They all were of great interest and of high quality. We had a difficult time selecting the 10 we include here from the many interesting ones submitted. The more the manuscripts poured in, the more excited we became about what is happening

Some Conceptual Issues in Individual and Group-Oriented Strategies of Intervention into Organizations

This paper is an attempt to conceptualize and contrast some of the psychological and sociological assumptions underlying two different strategies of social intervention: an individually oriented strategy which assumes that individual change is the primary mediator of organization change and a group-oriented strategy which assumes that group-level phenomena, such as norms and values, are the primary mediators of organization change. It is not assumed that the views presented in this paper are complete or uncontroversial. On the contrary, by articulating these assumptions and their interrelationships, we hope to begin building systemic conceptual frameworks for describing the dynamics of social intervention. The understanding of social process provided by these frameworks may aid the practitioner in his application of an intervention approach and may help the theoretician-researcher to be more aware of gaps in his knowledge of social process.

Rationale, Research, and Role Relations in the Stirling Workshop

Criticisms of theory, design, and research connected with a workshop involving Catholics and Protestants from Belfast are assessed by the organizers and consultants responsible for the project. Differences in role and commitment are advanced as partial explanations for divergent assessments of the workshop.

The Leadership Literature and Its Relevance to Psychotherapy

When leadership is mentioned, it summons up images of great men and women, of power and its uses, of risk-taking initiatives, and imaginative forward movement. Yet the essence of leadership is that it is a relationship. For every leader there must be those who are willing to follow. Critical in understanding leadership is understanding the influence relationship that must develop between the people who are the leaders and those who are the followers. Not surprisingly, interest in the study of leadership has roots in the beginnings of recorded history; the empirical study of leadership has its origins in the beginnings of the social sciences (Allport, 1954). The concern of the present chapter is whether this long tradition of empirical study of leadership can contribute to our understanding of another very special influence relationship: psychotherapy.