KEGAN, Daniel Laurence, TRUST, OPENNESS, AND ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT: SHORT-TERM RELATIONSHIPS IN RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT LABORATORIES AND A DESIGN FOR INVESTIGATING LONG-TERM EFFECTS. Northwestern University, Ph.D., 1971 Social Psychology Copyright © 1971 DANIEL L KEGAN, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Reproduced by University Microfilms with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. A DISSERTATION?SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS for the degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Field of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences Evanston, Illinois June 1971 -1- CHAPTER ONE: Introduction and Dissertation Summary 1.01-01 1.02-01 1.01 Introduction American industry has a tradition of trying to improve itself by various means, including research on its own problems and potential solutions. Frederick Taylor, the father of "Scientific. Management" (Merrill, 1960), was primarily concerned with efficiency: the readily measured efficiency of direct labor and material costs. George Mayo, in his Hawthorne studies of human relations in industry, extended the range of inquiry to include a broadened concept of man. Man was conceived, not as a somewhat unreliable machine, but as a human, an individual. Today, organizational development (OD) is concerned with increasing the effectiveness of individuals, groups, and organizations. Organizational development is concerned not solely with the individual, nor solely with the organization, but with the symbiotic and synergistic relationship between them. 1.02 Effectiveness, trust, and organizational development This research project addressed two general questions from the viewpoint of organizational behavior and humanistic psychology: a) what contributes to "effective" behavior in organizations, and b) how can such effective behavior be facilitated. Measuring organizational effectiveness has been a difficult problem for the general organizational theorist; the problem is much more severe for the theorist examining research and development laboratories. Economic results are only the indirect products of an R&D lab; the direct product is information. An underlying thesis of this study, then, is that attention to information creation and exchange--to communication--can relate directly to effectiveness.?Appropriate trust and openness are believed to improve creativity and communication, especially in highly dynamic environments. Trust may be conceived as a preconscious condition permitting one to enter a situation with minimal defensiveness. Its behavioral manifestation involves opening oneself up to -2- 1.02-02 a situation, exposing oneself to the remaining unpredictability of the situation. Two aspects of trust and two aspects of openness may be differentiated. There?is trust of oneself and there is trust of "the other." Also, openness may be with respect to receiving information or with respect to giving information. Trust of self facilitates an individual's reality-testing, adaptation, and learning. In addition, appropriate trust of one's co-workers and openness with them facilitates their adaptation, learning, and improved effectiveness. It is improved information exchange that connects trust with effectiveness (see Figure 1). A simplified sketch of this chain of relationships may be made. Trust of self permits openness to, and awareness of, the organizational environment--its goals, resources, and constraints. That is, nondefensive perception allows the individual to obtain a more valid conception of "reality"; and a more valid "reality" permits an individual to function more fully and more effectively. Nondefensive communications help one's co-workers receive more accurate information, which in turn can lead to a more valid "reality" and to more effective functioning on their part. Nondefensive and open communication and behavior also facilitate collaborative rather than competitive behaviors on the part of others. This is especially significant for sequential decision processes, such as are typical of many management and research programs. Competitive strategies have a tendency to result in suboptimal solutions, while collaborative strategies may evoke synergistic solutions. Such collaborative strategies may include participative decision-making-- a mode of organizational operations in which decisions are arrived at by the persons who are affected, or feel they are affected, by them. However, participative decision-making violates some traditional bureaucratic norms, especially those concerned with organizational control. Under various collaborative strategies, organizational control is not abandoned, but is made more specific. Of the three aspects of control--objectives, processes, and feedback--retention of some control aspects by the organizational hierarchy and distribution of some to the organizational membership may facilitate creative and effective organizational functioning. In summary, trust, nondefensive perceptions, open communication, and appropriate collaboration and control can contribute to effective behavior in organizations. However, there are individual and organizational barriers to trust, openness, and collaboration--and therefore to improved effectiveness. One possible cause of such barriers is poor learning¥ Figure 1 . Self Openness to experience (Communication input), Self learning, adaptation reality-testing, Trust of Other, Openness to other (Communication output), Other's learning, adaptation, reciprocity Improved decision making Improved organizational Trust of Improved self effectiveness effectiveness Other parameters -4- 1. 02-03 As many organization theorists have noted (e.g., Argyris, 1969; McGregor, 1960), one's assumptions about the nature of man and the world influence how he perceives, feels, thinks, and acts. Many individuals in contemporary America have learned that it is dangerous to be open with others. Moreover, they have learned to mistrust themselves--to mistrust their perceptions, their feelings, and their competences. Such mistrust and defensiveness tend toward a closed, non-adapting system. Such systems are liable to impair effectiveness, especially at a time when our environment is changing at an increasingly rapid rate and when both our society and our organizations are becoming increasingly complex and increasingly interrelated. However, it is unlikely that such a closed organizational climate will change without some external stimulation (cf. Greiner, 1967). Organizational development (OD) is one form of "external" stimulation. OD is an educational strategy employing experienced-based behavior in order to achieve a self-renewing organization. OD generally stresses the value-- for both the individual and for his work effectiveness in the organization-- of confrontation, choice, and collaboration. These behaviors require some trust of self and of one's co-workers. OD seeks to facilitate the development of trust and openness, so that the organizational members may remove barriers which prevent the release of human potential within the organization. This concern for human potential is one of several aspects of organizational development which have evolved from humanistic psychology. Humanistic?psychology has extended the image of man, and sees him as an organic, whole person, who exists (cf. Maslow, 1962; Perls, 1960; Rogers, 1961). Life is often seen as a process of discovery: discovery of the self in experience and of the outer world through experience. Although discussing theater, Spolin's (1963: 3) comments on experience and learning are consistent with this humanistic.. spirit: We learn through experience and experiencing, and no one teaches anyone anything. This is as true for the infant moving from kicking to crawling to walking as it is for the scientist with his equations. If the environment permits it, anyone can learn whatever he chooses to learn; and if the individual permits it, the environment will teach him everything it has to teach. A major dependent variable of humanistic psychology and of organizational development is man's effectiveness: how well he is achieving his potential, how fully functioning he is. According to humanistic psychology, if the individual trusts himself enough to be sufficiently open to the experience of -5- 1. 02-04 1.03-01 his organism, which in turn reflects experience of the world, he will discover whatever guidance and control is necessary for his healthy growth. Openness?to others promotes individual well-being, while hiding one's feelings or trying to "play the part" of another's expectations hinders authentic behavior.?This is a self-centered model of man, but not in a pejorative sense. Man is a social being; his individual organism naturally reflects concerns of the species, of "the other." It would only be by keeping closed to part of his experience that man could be, in the pejorative sense, selfish. 1.03 Method?The development of a methodology for the rigorous testing of specific propositions concerning trust, organizational development, and organizational behavior was a major concern of this study. A rather complicated research design evolved which attempted to reduce many plausible methodological rival hypotheses present in early studies of the effects of sensitivity training and organizational development. This concern for rigor led to several features of the research design--a design calling for longitudinal research of a natural quasi-experiment in a field setting. There have been many studies of trust in laboratory situations. However, such a situation cannot readily reproduce the extended commitment, importance of outcomes, intergroup relations, and complexity of the natural environment which naturally occur in operating organizations. Thus, to have increased confidence that the results of this project would validly represent actual "real-world" conditions, a field study design was chosen. Another threat to validity concerned the selection of participating organizations and the possible interaction between the "experimental stimulus"-- the organizational development program--and the measurement procedures. If?only organizations committed to a program of organizational change were included in the study, the research results might not be applicable to organizations not engaged in such a program. Since it was desired to test propositions representative of organizational behavior in general, it was critical that not all participating organizations be involved in organizational development programs. To avoid another possible confounding factor, the author strictly maintained his relationship to the participating organizations as that of a researcher rather than as a consultant. -6- 1. 03-02 Finally, it was desired to obtain data at more than a single point of time. This would further probe the generality of the findings and would provide some evidence for the determination of causality. In addition, such a longitudinal approach was considered as a pilot test of the current feasibility of?conducting "administrative experimentation" in research and development laboratories (Campbell, 1967; cf. Likert, 1967). Thus, a multiple time-series, natural quasi-experimental research design was chosen as an evolutionary framework to study organizational development in research and development laboratories1 (Campbell & Stanley, 1963). Nine focal groups, each with five to ten members, from three companies participated in?the study. The three companies varied in their involvement with organizational development programs. One of the companies had an active OD program, the second company was using some sensitivity training in its OD, and the third company had not heard of OD. Most individuals completed two (in some cases one or three) batteries of questionnaires several months apart. These questionnaires measured demographic items, some personality traits (openness to experience, ego strength, and defensiveness), self-actualization, intergroup dependencies, the evaluation of past decisions, and the group climate--focusing on trust and openness of communications.2 Ratings of the group's effectiveness--toward the organization and toward its own subgoals--at several intervals were made by the participants, some peer groups, and several levels of their supervisors. For several of the scales, specific referenced groups were indicated. These referenced groups included target groups and standard control groups. Target groups were groups previously identified as having significant work-related interaction with a focal group of the study. The control groups--"people-in- general" and "your best friend"--served as "zero points" to promote comparisons across groups, companies, and time. 1Research and development departments were chosen because a) such departments are concerned with creativity, information exchange, and decision-making, and thus an atmosphere of trust and openness was expected to have significant effects; and b) the Program of Research on the Management of Research and Development, Northwestern University, has been engaged in a continuing research program on?R&D organizations (POMRAD, 1970). 2The study was designed so that it could be extended into a longer-term study; thus self-administered questionnaires were chosen as research instruments. In addition to scales developed by the author, scales for the various variables were obtained from: Fitzgerlad, 1966a, 1966b (openness to experience); the MMPI (ego strength--Es, defensiveness--K); Bonjean & Vance, 1968 (self-actualization); Jourard & Lasalow, 1958 (self-disclosure); and a modified form of Rosenberg's 1956 faith-in-people scale (trust). -7- 1.04 Hypotheses and results?Several hypotheses were tested in this study. The three main hypotheses concerned trust and individual effectiveness, organizational effectiveness, and organizational development programs. The first hypothesis was supported. H 1. The more an individual trusts his work group and the more he generally trusts others with whom he interacts during his work, the greater will be his self-actualization. Using data from the first questionnaire administration, a significant relationship {p