Social Behavior and
the Administrative Process
Perhaps the most vigorous movement in administration in recent
years has been directed toward the development of a comprehensive
theory capable of generating both hypotheses for guiding research
and principles for guiding practice. Despite many specific advances
in special areas, such as hospital administration, public administra-
tion, business administraton, and educational administration, there
still is no general conceptual framework for systematizing and inter-
relating our knowledge within and among these areas. It is still im-
possible to speak of administration in terms that would be accept-
able to, or for that matter even readily understandable by, students
and practitioners in the several special fields. This failure to con-
ceptualize administration on a general theoretical level has been a
major obstacle to the development of administration as a rigorous
discipline, and the elaboration of theory is accordingly receiving in-
creased attention both in "research" and "applied" administrative
settings.
The purpose of the present paper is twofold: (a) to describe a
socio-psychological theory of social behavior having broad applica-
tion to the area of administration and (b) to illustrate the applica-
tion of the theory to major issues in administration. The four major
issues considered here are: the problem of institutional and individ-
ual conflict; the problem of staff effectiveness, efficiency, and satis-