Regeneration of Strategic Organizations

One way of increasing the social responsiveness of OB, especially in the Third World, is to increase its contribution to the effectiveness of strategic organizations, that is, organizations set up to, or desiring to, achieve social priorities, such as public enterprises. These strategic organizations have pioneering missions but they are often subjected to severe regulatory pressures because of their dependence on or control by the government. They tend, therefore, to malfunction. In this paper the successful regeneration of an international sample of a dozen public enterprises is analysed and compared with the regeneration of an international sample of 30 private enterprises. The study indicates that even very sick public enterprises can be regenerated with the right kind of management. While there are some commonalties between the management of regeneration of public and private enterprises, there are also sharp differences, with the former exhibiting much more of a participatory, Theory Y orientation. The tools of action research, OD, behavioural science can, therefore, be more easily and successfully employed in regenerating public enterprises. OB should devise additional tools that can help the managements of sick public enterprises to turn around their enterprises. Also, OB experts wishing to contribute to the regeneration of public enterprises should enlarge their familiarity with tools of the management sciences to avoid over-reliance on just behavioural bias in diagnosing the ills of the organization. An important finding of the study is that relatively novel, creative, innovative ways of regenerating contribute significantly to regeneration. The tools of creative thinking such as brainstorming, and interventions that can usher in a climate of creativity in the organization can therefore usefully supplement Theory Y approaches to turning around strategic organizations. It would be productive for behavioural scientists to integrate creativity in such tools as action research, confrontation meetings, interpersonal competence labs, survey feedback, job enrichment, participate re-design of work, team building etc.