Dynamic Workplace

The complexity and dynamism of organizations make them difficult to understand and manage. This book presents the workings and designs of organizations and identifies the types of problems encountered by organizational workers. Allcorn provides an essential focus on dynamic workplace theory, questioning the current and future value of today's bureaucratic, hierarchic organizational structure. Allcorn advocates a shared theoretical perspective that is clear and comprehensive. His theory explains organizational life, encompassing four types of work experience: chaotic, bureaucratic, charismatic, and balanced. He proposes an organizational design that eschews positions of authority and power and eliminates severe, often hindering bureaucracy.

Clear and comprehensible without being simplistic, the book offers insights into how organizations actually function and proposes ways to intervene when organizations grow stale, become self-defeating in their missions, or develop into hostile environments for their employees. The insights and ideas presented here are of considerable and enduring importance to corporate trainers, consultants, group process experts, governmental agencies and entities, executives at all levels, academics, and students of organizational life and its various processes.

SETH ALLCORN is a principal of DyAD, a consulting firm specializing in organizational development and management, in Asheville, North Carolina. Author of eight books on management and organizational life and numerous articles, he holds an MBA and a doctorate in Higher and Adult Education. His most recent books include Managing People During Stressful Times (1997), The Human Cost of a Management Failure (1996), and Anger in the Workplace (1994).