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Chapter III · § ii

The theory guide — A to Z.

When you already know what you're looking for. Every theory indexed alphabetically, with one-line summaries, the canonical reference, and a marker for which level of analysis it lives at.

Level I · IndividualLevel II · GroupLevel III · Organisational42 entries

A02 entries

Affective events theory

Weiss & Cropanzano, 1996

Small workplace events produce small emotions; small emotions accumulate into the year you're having.

Attribution theory

Heider · Kelley · Weiner

When their behaviour is the issue it's their character; when ours is, it was the situation. The "fundamental" mistake.

B02 entries

Big Five personality

Costa & McCrae, 1992

Five trait dimensions that explain a surprisingly large amount, and a surprisingly small amount, of who shows up at work.

Burns & Stalker — mechanistic / organic

Burns & Stalker, 1961

Two structural shapes, and the conditions under which each one quietly breaks the other.

C03 entries

Cognitive dissonance

Festinger, 1957

We do not act on what we believe. We come to believe what we have just done.

Competing values framework

Quinn & Rohrbaugh, 1983

Clan, adhocracy, market, hierarchy. Most workplaces try to be all four and end up being none.

Thomas & Kilmann, 1974

Compete, accommodate, avoid, compromise, collaborate. None is always right; all are usually misused.

E02 entries

People do not compare themselves to ideals. They compare themselves to the person two desks over.

Expectancy theory

Effort is a multiplication, not an addition — and any term going to zero collapses the whole.

F01 entry

French & Raven's bases of power

French & Raven, 1959

Five sources of power — coercive, reward, legitimate, referent, expert. Most workplaces over-use the first three.

G02 entries

Goal-setting theory

Locke & Latham, 1990

Specific, difficult goals beat "do your best" — almost always, and especially when the work is dull.

Cohesion is good for output and bad for judgement. The team that agrees too quickly should be the one you worry about.

H01 entry

Hackman & Oldham — job characteristics model

Hackman & Oldham, 1976

A job's design — skill variety, task identity, autonomy, feedback — does more for motivation than any motivational speech.

J01 entry

Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001

The job description is a starting position, not a destination — most people quietly re-craft what they do.

K01 entry

Kotter's 8-step change model

The famous staircase — best used not as a recipe, but as a checklist of things you forgot.

L03 entries

Leader–member exchange (LMX)

There is no "the team". There are as many teams as there are dyads. Lead the relationships, not the org chart.

Lewin's change model

Unfreeze, change, refreeze. Still the cleanest map of why change initiatives don't stick.

Locke & Latham — see Goal-setting

cross-reference

See entry under G · Goal-setting theory.

M01 entry

Mintzberg's configurations

Mintzberg, 1979

Five basic shapes the organisation can take. Most dysfunction is a shape mismatch.

O01 entry

Organisational learning

Argyris & Schön, 1978

Single-loop vs double-loop learning — and why most "lessons learned" sessions only do the first.

P02 entries

Practice theory

Schatzki · Nicolini

Organisations are not what they say they are. They are what they repeatedly, embodiedly, do.

Psychological safety

Edmondson, 1999

The single condition without which most other team interventions are theatre.

R02 entries

Resource dependence theory

Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978

Organisations are shaped, daily, by the things they need but do not control.

Reinforcement theory

Behaviour is shaped by what follows it. The hardest part is noticing what is actually following what.

S04 entries

Schein's culture model

Artifacts, espoused values, basic assumptions — and the depressing distance between each layer.

Self-determination theory

Deci & Ryan, 1985

Why autonomy, competence and relatedness are not motivators — they are the conditions in which motivation appears.

The single best predictor of whether someone will try the hard thing is whether they believe they can.

Social identity theory

Tajfel & Turner, 1979

The group is not just where you work; under the right conditions, it is who you become at work.

T03 entries

Transformational leadership

The four "I"s — idealised influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, individualised consideration.

Trist & Bamforth — sociotechnical systems

Trist & Bamforth, 1951

Technology and social structure must be designed together, or one will silently eat the other.

Tuckman's stages

Forming, storming, norming, performing — and the underrated fifth: adjourning, often skipped at great cost.

A further 14 cross-references and minor entries are omitted from this typographic scaffold — they will appear in the live build.