personalities of workers in public agencies. Despite successes in these and other areas, psychology remains a difficult, hard-to-pinpoint field ; moreover, establishing satisfactory personnel, policies,for example, remains an elusive goal. Even the tests themselves have been challenged in recent years.
Nonetheless, work in the area of organizational psychology continues, especially as researchers seek to understand how some individuals act as effective leaders within organizations and others do not.
Similar to psychology, the sociological approach to administration suggests that organizations can be understood by exploring how the parts
come together to create a larger whole. Sociologists insist that the unit of analysis is the group, not the individual. Thus, the sociological approach is founded on a key insight, namely, that understanding group behavior and dynamics can yield insights into the behavior of complex organizations. This
perspective requires researchers
to examine the form and function formal and informal groups within an organization. Formal groups are those subunits of an organization identified on an organizational chart as important components of the whole. In many cases, they are divided into departments and
staffed by officers of the organization.
By contrast, informal groups are those often de facto groups that arise within an organization but fall outside the formal, identifiable structure of formal groups. They may include department heads and other executives, but not necessarily so. Individuals who do not hold formal positions of leadership within the organization sometimes lead informal groups ; they provide
leadership in fulfilling some tasks by virtue of their expertise, longevity or
personality instead of their formal positions of authority. Informal groups are much difficult to identify than formal groups, yet they may be extremely important to the successful operation of an organization. These groups exhibit
recognizable patterns of behavior and the literature indicates that theorists can learn much about how an organization behaves by examining group
dynamics, that is, how groups are formed,structured, and operated.
As the sociological approach came to be accepted by public administration theorists, the focus shifted to a field labeled"organization development,"
or "OD."Proponents of OD seek to discover the factors that create an
organizational culture, that is, and accepted method of acting within the organization. According to this perspective, if researchers understand the culture of a bureaucracy, they can examine the factors that influence its behavior. An organization's culture affects virtually all of its aspects, including how groups