A Model For Diagnosing

Managing Organizations
Readings and Cases

DAVID A. NADLER
MICHAEL L. TUSHMAN

NINA G. HATVANY

Little, Brown and Company
Boston Toronto

LB Frameworks for Organizational Behavior

A model for diagnosing
David A. Nadler and Michael L. Tushman

organizational behavior:
Applying a congruence perspective

Management's primary job is to make organiza tions operate effectively.Society's work gets done through organizations and management's func tion is to get organizations to perform that work. Getting organizations to operate effectively is dif ficult, however. Understanding one individual's behavior is challenging in and of itself; under standing a group that's made up of different individuals and comprehending the many re lationships among those individuals is even morecomplex. Imagine, then, the mind-boggling complexity of a large organization made up of thousands of individuals and hundreds of groups with myriad relationships among these individ uals and groups. But organizational behavior must be managed
jn spite of this overwhelming complexity; ulti

mately the organization's work gets done through people, individually or collectively, on their ownSource: Reprinted, by permission of the publisher, from Organisational Dynamics, Autumn 1980, © 1980 by AMACOM, a division of American Management Associations. All rights reserved.

or in collaboration with technology. Therefore, the management of organizational behavior is central to the management task—a task that in* volves the capacity to understand the behavior partems of individuals, groups,and organiza* tions, to predict what behavioral responses will be elicited by various managerial actions, and finally to use this understanding and these predictions to achieve control. How can one achieve understanding and leam how to predict and control organizational behav ior? Given its inherent complexity and enigmatic nature, one needs tools to unravel the mysteries, paradoxes, and apparentcontradictions that pre sent themselves in the everyday life of organiza tions. One tool is conceptual framework or model. A model is a theory that indicates which factors (in an organization, for example) are most critical or important. It also shows how these fac tors are related—that is, which factors or com bination of factors cause other factors to change. In a sense then, a model is a roadmapthat can be used to make sense of the terrain of organiza tional behavior.
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David A. Nadler and Michael L Tushman

The models we use are critical because they
guide our analysis and action. In any organiza

problem analysis. Finally, we will discuss some of
the model's implications for thinking about or
ganizations.

tional situation, problem solving involves thecollection of information about the problem, the interpretation of that information to determine specific problem types and causes, and the devel opment of action plans accordingly. The models that individuals use influence the kind of data they collect and the kind they ignore; models guide people's approach to analyzing or interpret ing the data they have; finally, models help people choose their courseof action. Indeed, anyone who has been exposed to an organization already has some sort of implicit model. People develop these roadmaps over time, building on their own experiences. These implicit models (they usually are not explicitly written down or stated) guide behavior; they vary in qual ity, validity, and sophistication depending on the nature and extent of the experiences .of the modelbuilder, his or her perceptiveness, his or her abil ity to conceptualize and generalize from experi ences, and so on. We are not solely dependent, however, on the implicit and experience-based models that indi viduals develop. Since there has been extensive research and theory development on the subject of organizational behavior over the last four de

A BASIC VIEW OF

ORGANIZATIONS
There...