A traveler arrives in a strange land and, being hungry, follows the smell of something cooking. She is surprised to pass people on the path who seem to be on starvation’s door. Emaciated and miserable, they reach out to her with withered hands and arms, but she has nothing to give them. She enters a great hall and there in the middle of the room is a huge cauldron full of delicious-looking stew, where the wonderful smells are coming from. But the only utensils available are spoons with handles too long for anyone to put the stew in their mouths. Although there is food aplenty, no one can eat. Seeing this misery, the traveler runs from the hall, determined to leave this land. But in the very next village, the same smell attracts her again. She is even hungrier now, so she risks taking the path to a hall that looks identical to the one she had just left. But there is no sign of starvation here. Cherry-cheeked people are strolling to and from the entrance. When the traveler enters the hall, she sees the same cauldron with the same delicious-looking stew and the same long-handled spoons. But there the similarity ends. In this hall, every person dips in a spoon and feeds the stew to a neighbor. The traveler takes her place feeding and being fed. Everyone has a part to play. No one goes hungry.

Considering those accomplishments of ancient civilizations that could have been achieved only by planning, coordinating, and allocating resources among groups of people (think Stonehenge, pyramids, Great Wall, or even hunting large beasts), management must have been practiced for a very long time. In this chapter, we show how current changes in organizations have led management theory to question assumptions of individualism and hierarchy; at the same time, the theory is only just beginning to provide systematic evidence to evaluate its approaches. Thus, although management theory may be seen as a prototypical application of the mechanistic paradigm, current organizational issues such as globalization and rapid change have forced it to pioneer some systemic-like approaches.

These questions and many others are dealt with every day by managers in both for-profit and not-for-profit organizations, not to mention political appointees and bureaucrats in government and governmental agencies.

Management theory has to do with how to organize the work that people do. Although the focus of much of management education is on financial and physical resource measurement and control, ultimately organizations are about people. As one textbook (Johns & Saks, 2005) puts it, “Organizations are social inventions for accomplishing common goals through group effort” (p. 6). Therefore, our survey of management and organizational theory and their relationship to coaching includes industrial/organizational psychology and social psychology.

In chapter 12, we discussed the importance of research in establishing a scientific base for psychotherapy. Because it is an applied field, psychotherapy research has had to be concerned not only about doing good science but also about whether its techniques actually can be put into practice in the real world. Management theory faces similar challenges and opportunities in overcoming its come-and-go fad reputation. The statistical method of meta-analysis can help managers develop a systems perspective and a way of thinking about complex change that characterizes leadership rather than just management.

We discuss these topics in this chapter:

Concern with actually making products or providing services is closest to Taylor’s scientific management approach. Organizations want to measure and improve the amount that can be produced, its scheduling, the reduction of inventory, product or service quality, and efficiency of operations. This reflects what Douglas McGregor (1960) renamed Theory X, meaning a pessimistic assumption about human nature that resulted in the need for top-down control, punishment, and rewards. But subsequent organizational theorists, such as Elton Mayo, proposed adding to Taylor’s “hard data” time-and-motion studies the “softer” side of human motivation, which McGregor dubbed Theory Y, or the assumption that people are self-motivated and willing to take responsibility for improving productivity. MBA students learn techniques that reflect both “hard” and “soft” approaches. The material presented next draws on Steven Silbiger’s The Ten Day MBA (1999), a summary of the curriculum of major business schools in the United States.

For example, after World War II, interest in egalitarianism and democracy aided the emergence of “third wave” humanistic psychotherapy, as discussed in chapter 10, which also influenced management theory and eventually coaching. Much of this influence was expressed in the popular self-help movement and in trends such as quality circles. Stewart (2006) does not see these trends as entirely benign:

In response to this criticism, it should be pointed out that management theory has also depended on I/O psychologists for assessments that are used extensively in hiring, placing, and developing personnel. The process of analyzing a position, devising a job description, and helping to match potential employees is an important part of I/O training. Several widely used career, personality, emotional intelligence, ability, and performance measures, among others, were devised in order to help organizations manage human resources.

I/O psychology has also not been immune from other critics who took aim at unexamined assumptions in psychology following the liberation movements of the 1960s. As Prilleltensky (1994) stated, this belief was common in most of 20th-century psychology: “Inequality, power, discrimination, and the like are the result not of injustice but of lack of scientific progress” (p. 141). However, power itself is a topic of research in I/O psychology, although it is seldom accompanied by the type of self-examination that Prilleltensky promoted. Different types of power have been identified:

Leadership theory is a related field that has gained importance in I/O and management circles in the late 20th and early 21st centuries and shows promise of overcoming the hierarchical assumptions. When every member of an organization—or, indeed, anyone in any walk of life—is encouraged to exhibit qualities of leadership, this can be seen as the development of referent power, unrelated to a formal position, and fits with a participatory rather than a command-and-control mentality.

However, as evidence accumulated, its subject matter influenced the field of social psychology to participate in the shift to a less individualistic approach. Many of the topics investigated by social psychologists have relevance to coaching, which is, after all, a social relationship with the goal of promoting change.

The “evidence” Cialdini collected was not the same as that of his colleagues who conducted more traditional laboratory experiments: He assumed that if salespeople were making a living, they must be doing something effective. He set about to describe what that was and identified six principles that he called “weapons of persuasion” (Cialdini, 1984, 2007). Not only have these “weapons been verified time and again as the explanations for why persuasion works, but Cialdini’s research methods brought hands-on, participatory research more into the mainstream of scientific inquiry. Here are the weapons Cialdini described:

In the Robber’s Cave Experiment, Muzafer Sherif and colleagues (1961) manipulated relationships between groups of boys at a summer camp to produce competition and conflict and then cooperation.

These experiments illustrated the importance of social context and stimulated hundreds of subsequent studies on the conditions that result in conflict or cooperation within and between groups.

In 1986 Bandura published Social Foundations of Thought and Action in which he proposed that people are proactive, self-reflective, and self-organizing rather than driven by inner impulses or shaped by external environmental forces. His views accelerated the integration of social psychology, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience with adult learning, thus contributing to the shift from a mechanistic to a systemic worldview.

Kurt Lewin’s (1947, 1999) work with groups was one base for sensitivity and human relations training, the T-group movement of the 1960s, and eventually some of the applications that led to coaching.

In summary, early social psychologists were concerned mainly with the effects of social groups and society on the individual, in keeping with the individualism of the mechanistic worldview.

A key aspect of systems theory and its linkage to coaching is the concept of working with clients to help them see the patterns in the systems in which they are living. This requires taking a “meta-view,” meta being based on a Greek word for “across” or “over.” By taking a meta-view of the various systems, a client increases awareness and knowledge of patterns, and gains the ability to choose how to influence and/or change those patterns in the future.

In the coaching relationship, the coach plays the role of agenda-free observer who can offer clarity of distance to clients by feeding back to them what the coach is seeing.

The systemic perspective questions the positivistic assumption that an observer actually can be separate from whatever event is being observed. However, this does not mean that we should give up on achieving a useful perspective on what is going on, one that takes advantage of clarity of distance. Rather than rejecting all observations as flawed, scientific inquiry in a systemic paradigm requires, first, that observations be gathered from as many different perspectives as possible. This is the kernel of 360-degree assessments. An observer who is at some distance from the event can provide unique feedback.

An additional requirement for usefulness is transparency—that any agendas or interests or emotional connections be acknowledged.

The scientific method involves a series of individual experiments or groups of experiments that produce results reported in the scientific literature. One experiment, either successful or not, is not considered conclusive. Only when the conclusions have been verified repeatedly, perhaps with variations that test alternative explanations, are they generally accepted as valid. Over time, research studies accumulate on a particular topic, for example, the effects on heart attacks of taking aspirin. Some studies show the effects of higher doses, some of lower doses, some with people who have already had heart attacks, some with younger people, some with older, and so forth. Some show no effect at all. How does one get a picture of what all this means so that doctors know what to recommend to their patients? Systematic summarizing of highly variant data is exactly what meta-analysis was designed to do. Meta-analytic researchers take great care to find all the relevant studies, assess each study for the quality of its design and execution, and combine the findings from individual studies in an unbiased manner. In this way, they aim to present a balanced and impartial summary of the existing research evidence.

White (1998) suggested that every step beyond a known realm provides an overview of that realm and yields deeper insight into how it fits into the greater picture. Children leave the womb, their schools, their families, their hometowns, and often their countries and continents. Each of these moves permits an overview that includes the past, more limited, perspective. Each new perspective permits greater understanding and the chance to alter actions based on these new experiences and insights, perhaps even to become a transforming element in the new context.

Our ability to see a paradigm relies on our moving beyond it to a new paradigm. We cannot see the shape of a cloud when we are flying through it. As we get farther away, its outline becomes more visible. From the perspective of the new, systemic worldview, we can see the shape of the mechanistic paradigm more easily than we could when it was more predominant, when we were more “in” it.

Based on interviews with and writings by 29 astronauts and cosmonauts, White (1998) shows how experiences such as circling Earth every 90 minutes and viewing it from the moon have profoundly affected space travelers’ perceptions of themselves, their world, and the future. One astronaut stated, “I guess it’s a bit like being a savage from the rain forest, suddenly stuck into Notre Dame.” After six space walks, the astronaut described the experience of viewing the planet from outside the shuttle. “You’re in the environment, as opposed to looking at [it] through a window, which is like watching it on TV,” he says. “It’s not like looking at the fish—you’re swimming with the fish.”

How taking a meta-view relates to coaching is illustrated by looking at a client’s view of his or her “ideal self.” We have discussed the concept of “strange attractors” in chaos theory or points in a person’s life that seem to be anchors for patterns. One’s “ideal self” is one of these anchors.

This is an example of how the coaching process can assist clients to take a much broader perspective, including all of the internal and external patterns that are present in the system. By completing an informal meta-analysis in this way, the client has a new perspective and a much more reliable foundation on which to make future decisions.

To the extent that coaches self-manage their own agendas, they can contribute an overview that provides clarity of distance. This enhances the client’s ability to take a meta-view. As the coaching conversation unfolds, the coach can see patterns that are revealed across different areas of a client’s life. With clarity of distance, the coach can make connections that the client is too close to see. In this way, coaching assists clients to create meaning and draw overarching conclusions, thus completing their informal meta-analysis.

As we shall see in chapter 14, research and applications regarding positive organizations, psychological capital, and human capital in general complement individual coaching in transforming hierarchical authority into participatory leadership. This is why coaching, with its genesis in contextual and community aspects of systemic thinking, will undoubtedly continue to serve as a means to promote positive change in organizations.