Abstract
The Organization Development movement is a positive and potentially fruitful influence that is being felt in the area of church administration. However, there may be problems involved in transferring the techniques of the movement directly and uncritically into congregational administration. Alluding to research which suggests that the matrix of congregational administration may be radically different from the matrix in which Organization Development was designed, the author pleads for criticalness in the appropriation of Organization Development techniques by pastors. He further suggests that pastoral administrative behavior in service to goals and values that are shared by both the Organization Development movement and the clergy may at times resemble behavior in service to exactly the opposite values.
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References
W. L. French and C. H. Bell,Organization Development: Behavioral Science Interventions for Organizational Improvement (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973).
T. W. Adorno et al,The Authoritarian Personality (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1950).
Gordon Allport, “The Religious Context of Prejudice,”Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 5(Fall 1966): 447.
See D. Hoge and J. Carroll, “Religiosity and Prejudice, North and South,”Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 12(June 1973): 181–97; M. Rokeach,The Open and Closed Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1960); S. A. Stouffer,Communism, Conformity, and Civil Liberties (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1955); R. M. Williams,Strangers Next Door (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1964).
Allport, “Religious Context of Prejudice,” p. 455.
Ibid.
Adorno et al.,Authoritarian Personality; Allport, “Religious Context of Prejudice”; E. Fromm,Escape from Freedom (New York: Rinehart & Co., 1941).
Adorno et al.,Authoritarian Personality, p. 486.
F. H. Sanford, “Leadership Identification and Acceptance,” inGroups, Leadership, and Men, ed. H. Guetzkow (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963), pp. 159f.
A. H. Maslow,Eupsychian Management (Homewood, Ill.: Richard D. Irwin and the Dorsey Press, 1965).
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Hanson, G.W. Overdosing on Organization Development: Toward criticalness in pastoral administration. Pastoral Psychol 24, 206–214 (1976). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02211712
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02211712