Planned Change in Organization Style Based on the Laboratory Approach

This study reports the design and results of an effort to change the organization style of a sales unit in a business organization. The learning design was derived from the laboratory approach to organization development, and sought to create a specific kind of social order as well as to provide experience with appropriate skills and attitudes. Changes in organization style were measured with Likert's profile of organizational characteristics. A one-week learning experience helped induce significant changes in self-reports by managers about the style of interpersonal and intergroup relations in their organization, judging from before and after administrations of the profile. The bulk of the learning time was spent in a sensitivity training session, which was intended to prepare subordinates for a confrontation with their superiors concerning the needs of both as they were variously met by their unit's interpersonal and intergroup climate. The entire managerial population was exposed to the learning design, so that there was no control group. Therefore the changes in self-reports can only be tentatively attributed to the experimental design, rather than to random factors or the passage of time.