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William Bridges

The Character of Organizations: Using Personality Type in Organization Development Paperback – June 27 2000

by William Bridges (Author), Sandra Krebs Hirsh (Foreword)

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An enormous consulting industry has sprung up promising to help organizations overhaul themselves to meet today's competitive pressures. Yet far too often, such change efforts fail. The solution, according to best-selling management author William Bridges, lies in identifying, understanding and working with what he calls organizational character. Just as people have personalities, Bridges explains, organizations - as well as their departments and teams - have characters. An organization's character shapes how decisions get made and new ideas are received, how employees are treated and change is accepted or rejected - all factors that affect company performance. Using examples from McDonald's, Hewlett-Packard, GE and other companies, Bridges identifies 16 organizational character types using the framework of MBTI© personality types and shows how these influence an organization's growth and development. With a foreword by Sandra Krebs Hirsh and a new preface by the author, this updated edition of the time-tested classic includes the Organizational Character Index, Bridges' popular tool for assessing the character of your own organization or team.

Print length

176 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Quercus
Publication date

June 27 2000
Dimensions

15.24 x 0.64 x 22.86 cm
ISBN-10

0891061495
ISBN-13

978-0891061496
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Product description

Review

Gives change agents - organization development consultants, HR professionals, organizational psychologists, and top executives and mangers - an opportunity to further their understanding of why organizations act as they do and why they are so very hard to change. Includes detailed descriptions of the sixteen types of organizational character, the impact that an organization's life cycle may have on character development, and the consequences that mergers and acquisitions may have by juxtaposing different organizational character types.―Vision/Action: Journal of the Bay Area OD Network

This brief, well-written, and seminal volume uses type concepts to analyze how organizations handle their business operations, meet the challenges of competition and change, and deal with their employees and customers. It provides invaluable insights into the role of leadership and methods to promote team building, smoother career transitions, and a better fit for individuals, and offers new dimensions for exploring key aspects of life in the workplace.―Bulletin of Psychological Type

The first book devoted to an organizational interpretation of Jung's personality theory. Provides an exciting new lens for the organizational looking glass.―Open Forum: Publication of the Western New England OD Network

From the Publisher

"Today we can say that William bridges 'wrote the book' on organizational character just as we can say he 'wrote the book' on change. I have been using the insights in The Character of Organizations with assurance and great success for years. In this book, he offers helpful information on organizational character so that we can use it in a responsible, effective way for team building, career transition, leadership development, and change management. His writing is direct, crisp, and contemporary, with examples that speak to all of us in the field. Our clients who live in the 'real' world will find it a practical guide once they have learned about type and their organization's character. This book needs to be a part of your tool kit if you want to extend what you already know into more powerful applications for organizations."--from the Foreword by Sandra Krebs Hirsh

This book is the foundation of a larger training program by Bridges and his associate Chris Edgelow, called Working with Organizational Character. It includes a facilitator's guide, participant workbook, and the Organizational Character Index.

About the Author

William Bridges, PhD, was an internationally known speaker, consultant, and the author of ten books. He was known for his expertise in the "human side" of organizational change and made his career guiding individuals and organizations through transition. The professional seminars that he launched in 1988 now have certified thousands of managers, trainers, and consultants to conduct Transition Management programs worldwide.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

ORGANIZATIONAL CHARACTER AND WHERE IT COMES FROM The Concept of Character Everyone knows that organizations differ in their size, structure, and purpose, but they also differ in character. A play-it-safe, old-line manufacturing company has a very different character from a new start-up software company. They differ in the same way that two individuals do. And the character of both the manufacturing company and the software company differs from that of a state university, a community hospital, or an architectural firm. An organization's character is like the grain in a piece of wood. There is no such thing as good or bad grain, but some kinds of grain can take great pressure, other kinds can withstand bending or shearing forces, and still others are lovely and take a fine polish. Some are too soft or hard, too light or heavy for a particular purpose, but each has some purpose for which it is well fitted. There are other metaphors: Character is the typical climate of the organizational country; it is the personality of the individual organization; it is the DNA of the organizational life form. It is the organization's character that makes it feel and act like itself. Organizational character varies greatly and subtly. In one sense, there are as many characters as there are organizations. But those infinitely varied differences can be profitably grouped into sixteen basic categories.1 This system parallels the sixteen basic personality types developed from the work of the great Swiss psychologist Carl Jung by Americans Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers. This mother-daughter team created the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator(r) (MBTI(r)) instrument to identify an individual's personality type. As with personality type, organizational character can be established with a fair degree of objectivity. The Organizational Character Index , or OCI, which appears in Appendix A, does for organizations what Briggs and Myers did for individuals, although as a new instrument it has not yet been statistically validated. The OCI is an experimental tool meant to be used by people who work with and in organizations-people who are looking for useful tools and willing to test and improve them as they use them. The OCI is not an adaptation of the MBTI instrument, but it is based on the same four pairs of opposing tendencies that Myers and Briggs adapted from Carl Jung's work. As adapted from the individual realm to the organizational, those dichotomies are the following: ? Extraversion (E) or Introversion (I)-the organization's orientation, the location of its reality, and the source of its energy. Is the organization primarily outwardly oriented toward markets, competition, and regulations (Extraverted), or is it inwardly oriented toward its own technology, its leaders' dreams, or its own culture (Introverted)?2 ? Sensing (S) or Intuition (N)-how it gathers information, what it pays attention to, how it perceives. Is the organization primarily focused on the present, the details, and the actuality of situations (Sensing) or on the future, the big picture, and the possibilities inherent in situations (Intuition)? ? Thinking (T) or Feeling (F)-its way of processing information, its manner of judging situations, its way of making decisions. Does the organization do these things by an impersonal process so that decision making happens on the basis of such principles as con- sistency, competence, and efficiency (Thinking), or through a personal process that depends on values such as individuality, the common good, or creativity (Feeling)? ? Judging (J) or Perceiving (P)-does the organization tend to deal with its external world through one of the Judging functions (Thinking or Feeling) or through one of the Perceiving func- tions (Sensing or Intuition)? Organizations in which Judging predominates prefer to reach firm decisions, define things clearly, and get closure on issues. Organizations in which Perceiving predominates are always seeking more input, preferring to leave things loose, or opting to keep their choices open.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Quercus; Revised edition (June 27 2000)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 176 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0891061495
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0891061496
Item weight ‏ : ‎ 247 g
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 15.24 x 0.64 x 22.86 cm

Best Sellers Rank: #897,637 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,888 in Human Resource Management
- #3,861 in Human Resources & Personnel Management (Books)
- #5,128 in Workplace Processes & Infrastructure

Customer Reviews:
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William Bridges

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William Bridges is an internationally known speaker, author, and consultant who advises individuals and organizations in how to deal productively with change. His ten books include an expanded third edition of his best-seller, Managing Transitions (2009), and the updated second edition of Transitions (2004), which together have sold over one million copies. Before that he published The Way of Transition (2000), a partly autobiographical study of coming to terms with profound changes in his own life and transforming them into times of self-renewal. He published Creating You & Co., a handbook for creating a work-life that capitalizes on today's frequent and disruptive changes, and the ground-breaking Jobshift.

For three decades, he has guided thousands of individuals and hundreds of organizations through the maze of the transitions that accompany change. He focuses on the Transition, or psychological reorientation, people must go through to come to terms with changes in their lives. His three-phase model of Endings, Neutral Zone and New Beginnings is widely known. The professional seminars that he launched in 1988 have now certified more than 5,000 managers, trainers and consultants worldwide to conduct Transition Management programs. His later work has focused on bringing the principles of Transition Management into the non-profit world. He has been a frequent keynote speaker at conferences and corporate meetings in the United States and abroad.

Educated originally in the humanities at Harvard, Columbia, and Brown Universities, he was (until his own career change in 1974) a professor of American Literature at Mills College, Oakland, CA. He is a past president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology. The Wall Street Journal listed him as one of the top ten independent executive development presenters in America.

Customer reviews

4.2 out of 5

24 global ratings

5 star		46%
4 star		44%
3 star 0% (0%)		0%
2 star		3%
1 star		7%

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Top reviews from Canada

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Nigel Seel

Myers-Briggs for companies - surprisingly effective.

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on November 6, 2002

Criticisms that this book merely recycles standard Myers-Briggs ideas are misplaced. Most people familiar with ideas of psychological type might agree there was *some* case for an analogous approach to organisational character, perhaps at the level of the four categories of temperament. However, William Bridges succeeds in showing how applying the sixteen types of Myers-Briggs type theory can highlight essential and distinctive organisational characteristics. Most of his examples, although dated, seem compelling. There are a few issues: I suspect that most people would consider Hewlett-Packard to be SF, rather than ST, as Dr. Bridges has it (p. 25). And even for a book first published in 1990, the omission of Microsoft is a little surprising (INTJ?).
The other dimension of organisational analysis covered in this book is that of organisational development and lifecycle. Again, Dr. Bridges leverages type theory to develop some interesting ideas as to the different type-characteristics exhibited from organisation conception ("the Dream"), through maturity ("Becoming an Institution"), to organisational death. Given the extent of merger and acquisition activity in recent years, I was surprised to see how little attention Dr. Bridges gave to managing the cultural and developmental issues which surface when different company characteristics collide in M&A, (about half a page).
Finally, there is a deeper theoretical issue as to why Jungian/Myers-Briggs type theory - developed from Jung's theories of the human psyche, should be expected to apply to organisations at all. Do organisations assemble themselves around the type of their founders, does the type emerge as a side-effect of the types of employees who are best at tackling the company's problems, or is there a supra-human theory of "organisational psychology" trying to get out here? The book alludes to the existence of these kinds of problems, but does not really add much to our understanding.
All in all, this book will add value to anyone who already has a feel for the Myers-Briggs approach to personality types, and who is interested in effectively dealing with organisations.

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on August 28, 2000

I am thrilled this book has been published again, with the new forward as well as new insights from Bridges, without a word from the original work being changed. It was a classic as soon as it first came out, and it remains one still.
Over the past several years, there has been an insurgence of writing on the topic of organizational character and/or culture. While some of them have had a few interesting things to say, none have even come close to the clarity, familiarity and usefulness of The Character of Organizations. When this book first came out in 1992, I, a long time Myers Briggs junkie, became a man possessed. I tried to understand all of my organizational clients using this methodology and found it exceptionally useful in helping me to change my approach in the various different systems I was working at the time.
During the past 8 years, I have come to understand this simple, familiar approach to be the most helpful methodology in making sense of the complexity of organizational systems. Whenever I introduce it with either managers/leaders, or consultants working with organizations, the reactions are always the same. The "no wonder...", "a-ha's", or "so that's why..." indicate a breakthrough to another level of insight and understanding.
If managers and leaders read this book and made use of these concepts, they would find their ability to work more effectively with their departments, divisions, teams etc. increase dramatically and their frustrations dramatically reduce. If consultants, either internal or external, read this book and used the concepts as they both planned and implemented their interventions, the success of their interventions would significantly increase. The specific chapter on Character and Organization Development should be 'must reading' for all consultants working with organizations today.

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on May 8, 2001

Organizations have their own personalities, as William Bridges demonstrates by applying the most popular personality test ever devised for humans to groups of people working together. Bridges developed the “Organizational Character Index” (OCI) from the ubiquitous Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator. While OCI thus far lacks the rigorous testing of hundreds of certified Myers-Briggs trainers, intuitively the model makes sense. Bridges provides a useful way of thinking about organizational styles and tries to understand the nature of departments within organizations. Abundant examples, lists and charts help illustrate the principles. We...recommend this book to managers and human resource professionals seeking insight into the nuances of organizational development, provided that they are willing to spoon through a certain amount of alphabet soup. (Note: Though this book has a 2000 copyright date, with the exception of a new forward by Sandra Krebs Hirsh, it is a republication of a work written in about 1990.)

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

J. Hunter

Excellent Idea

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 22, 2006

Verified Purchase

This is a really useful application of the MBTI to organisational analysis. Bridges uses the analogy of personality at the organisational level to illustrate how companies can see where they are and where they want to be.

It's a shame he doesn't include more tangible exercises for companies to balance their typological preferences to help them, eg, for the first dichotomy he suggests introverted orgs tend to focus on core competence and extraverted orgs on the market and customers - a simple SWOT analysis would be an obvious familiar tool for orgs to use to help this - translates as IWET (!), keeping the Weaknesses and Threats part - so they could assess how to move forward and build their vision and structure change realistically with competence and context in mind.

2 people found this helpful

ANDRE Sophie

the most complete book on the most powerful approach (MBTI) applied to organization - a reference book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 15, 2012

Verified Purchase

this is a reference book for my daily job as HR consultant, especially for Team Coaching. A clear "must have"

Spike3

Read this as part of a course on OD in Congregational setting

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 21, 2012

Verified Purchase

I found quite a few chapters which provided some healthy perspectives on relationships and conflict resolution within church congregations. I had already read most of this book which I had checked out of a library and decided that the material was easily vital enough to warrant purchasing my own personal copy for later reference.

One person found this helpful

John Griner

This is a must read.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 4, 2017

Verified Purchase

If you do organizational development or study personality types related to your business this is a must read. I've probably given away 40 copies over the past 20 years.

Deer eye

I didn’t bay it

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 12, 2019

Verified Purchase

I didn’t bay

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The Character of Organizations: Using Personality Type in Organization Development Paperback – June 27 2000

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William Bridges

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