Stanley E. Seashore

A System Resource Approach to Organizational Effectiveness

The prevailing formal and implied conceptions of organizational effectiveness are examined and found deficient. When effectiveness is defined with reference to goal attainment, there are both methodological and conceptual problems, for the goals are those of persons (observers or members)-not of the organization itself-and there is in principle no possibility for stable consensus about the nature of the goals. When defined with reference to societal function, the values and standards for assessing organizational effectiveness are similarly external to the organization itself. An improved conceptual framework, derived from the systems model of organizations, is proposed; the framework emphasizes both the distinctiveness of the organization as an identifiable social structure and the interdependence of the organization with its environment. The interdependence takes the form of transactions in which scarce and valued resources are exchanged under competitive conditions. The organizations success over a period of time in this competition for resources-i.e., its bargaining position in a given environment-is regarded as an expression of its overall effectiveness. Since the resources are of various kinds, and the competitive relationships are multiple, and since there is interchangeability among classes of resources, the assessment of organizational effectiveness must be in terms not of any single criterion but of an open-ended multidimensional set of criteria. The implications of this conception for theory, for empirical investigation, and for organization management are discussed.

Predicting Organizational Effectiveness With a Four-Factor Theory of Leadership

Recent research in the area of leadership seems to point to the existence of four basic dimensions of leadership: support, interaction facilitation, goal emphasis, and work facilitation. Data from a recent study of 40 agencies of one of the leading life insurance companies are used to evaluate the impact of both supervisory and peer leadership upon outcomes of satisfaction and factorial performance measures. Results from the study suggest that this conceptual model is useful and that leaderships relation to organizational outcomes may best be studied when both leadership and effectiveness are multidimensional. Both peer and supervisory leadership measures relate to outcomes. In most instances, the ability to predict is enhanced by taking simultaneous account of certain nonleadership variables. David G. Bowers is program associate at the Center for Research on the Utilization of Scientific Knowledge, The University of Michigan. Stanley E. Seashore is professor of psychology and assistant director of the Institute for Social Research, The University of Michigan.

Factorial Analysis of Organizational Performance

The annual performances of seventy-five insurance sales agencies over an eleven-year period are examined by factorial analysis methods with a view toward discovering the factorial elements, initially presumed to be goals, that characterize the behavior of small business organizations. It was discovered that ten factors serve to describe most of the variance in a set of seventy-six selected performance indicators. The investigation included an analysis of the stability of the obtained factor structure, which is very high, and the stability of the performance of individual agencies over the period of time, which proved to be high for some aspects of performance and low for others. The factors of performance are of kinds that preclude their being viewed as representing stable goals of the organizations, i.e., as end states or outcomes of intrinsic value. It is suggested that the factors represent, instead, the continuing processes of resource acquisition which are characteristic of adaptive open systems. It is proposed that the conventional concepts of goals and goal attainment are not applicable to organizations, and that organizational performance can be assessed and described, instead, in terms of generalized resource-getting capabilities under conditions of competition for scarce and valued resources. Dr. Stanley E. Seashore is professor of psychology and assistant director of the Institute for Social Research, The University of Michigan. Dr. Ephraim Yuchtman, study director at the Institute and a recent Michigan Ph.D. in social psychology, has accepted a post at Tel-Aviv University, Israel.

Job Satisfaction Indicators and Their Correlates

Conceptions of job satisfaction until very recently have been largely psychological and individualistic in orientation. Empirical studies have been confined to local situations or special populations with interpretive purposes reflecting the values of employed individuals or of their managers. However, if job satisfaction measures are to be useful in monitoring the quality of employment on a societal scale, it will be necessary to enlarge the perspective, to invoke some societal and political values, and to begin to treat job satisfaction in the context of a larger array of associated variables. The measurement of job satisfaction as a social indicator may have three roles: (1) to represent a valued product of society-a component of the psychological GNP; (2) to provide a monitoring and diagnostic aid for’ early warning of societal dislocations, policy or program failure, and slowly developing societal changes; and (3) to provide a significant component in the theories and models to be used in the formulation of social

Job satisfaction as an indicator of the quality of employment

It is suggested that the quality of employment should be assessed from the value perspectives of the employer and of society as well as the perspective of the worker. The prevailing conception of the nature of job satisfaction, and the associated measurement methods, provide useful but unnecessarily limited indicators of the quality of employment. An enlarged conception is offered as to the nature of job satisfaction, its causes, and its possible consequences. The implications of this conception for the utility of satisfaction measures as social indicators are examined as to three aspects: (1) The psychology of job satisfaction; (2) The sociology of job satisfaction; (2) The approach and technology of using subjective satisfaction measures in conjunction with other indicators. The view is expressed that direct measures of subjective job satisfaction are an essential component in any effort to make comparisons or monitor changes in the quality of employment, but that such measures, like other subjective and objective indicators, have ambiguous meaning if used alone.

Creating Ethical Relationships in Organizational Research

When social and behavioral scientists leave their laboratory, clinical practice, or survey center to conduct research in organizations, they are not fully prepared for the challenge of being ethical. The ethical problems encountered in real-life settings take on unique and disconcerting features arising from the fact of social organization. In these cases, researchers are dealing with a social system composed of people who have positions in a hierarchy and who, in the collective identity as an organization, also have relationships with supporters, consumers, government, unions, and other public institutions. As a result, researchers cannot approach participants in the study as independent individuals because they behave within an interdependent framework of rights and responsibilities. Nor can they invoke existing distinctive guidelines for dealing with employees, managers, clients, or sponsors because all have overlapping interests that are sometimes in conflict. Finally, they cannot single-handedly manage the ethical dilemmas that arise because they are a weak force in a field of powerful forces, with only limited means for ensuring moral action or for redressing moral lapses. Questions are raised for researchers of their responsibilities, not only to individuals but also to the social system that encompasses them, for according to law and to custom, to harm a living system is analogous to harming a person.

The Design of Action Research

This chapter arises from my belief that there is a degree of inherent incompatibility between action and research, in the sense that maximizing one tends to minimize the other. The incompatibility is not absolute, for some of the most significant scientific contributions of recent years have stemmed from the combining of action and research. Further, the prime contemporary regions of needed scientific advance are those involving systemic and dynamic theories about organizational and social-psychological phenomena, to which action research strategies are particularly applicable. At the same time, it must be recognized that the scientific product of organizational intervention by social scientists is often modest in relation to the money and man-hours invested, and that research is widely regarded as an unfortunate impediment to effective action in a particular case.