The organismic metaphor has had a subtle yet important impact on our general thinking
by encouraging us to believe that the unity and harmony characteristic of organisms can be
achieved in organizational life. We often tend to equate organizational well-being with a state
of unity where everyone is “pulling together.” This style of thought usually leads us to see
“political” and other self-interested activity as abnormal or dysfunctional features that should
be absent in the healthy organization. As will become apparent from discussion in Chapter 6,
where we will be examining organizations as political systems, the emphasis upon unity
rather than conflict as the normal state of organization may be an inherent weakness of the
organismic metaphor. In recent years, those favoring the metaphor have begun to recognize
this weakness by giving more attention to the role of power in organizations, but they rarely
have gone so far as to abandon the ideal of functional unity. There are good reasons for this.
The idea that organizations can work in a functionally unified way is popular, particularly
among managers charged with the task of holding organizations together.