Works
- New Patterns of Management, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1961
- The Human Organization: Its Management and Value, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1967
- New Ways of Managing Conflict, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1976
In Organizational Structures
Known for
The linking-pin model, System 4, and the Likert scale
Ideas
Linking pin. The organization is a set of overlapping work groups, each joined to the group above by a member, usually its leader, who belongs to both, so that influence and information pass between levels through group membership. Caveat: Only passages of the book were read. Franklin (1975) found influence across levels ran mainly downward, with a time lag.
System 4. Likert ranked management systems from exploitive authoritative (System 1) through benevolent authoritative and consultative to participative group (System 4), and held that a firm's performance, on the average, is better the closer its management system is to System 4. Caveat: Only passages of the book were read. Burnes (2019) reports that the Weldon program used this classification and moved the firm from System 1 to System 3 by 1964.
Multiple overlapping groups. In the 1967 book Likert described the System 4 structure as multiple overlapping groups joined by linking pins, extended beyond the chain of command to a member who belongs to both a functional work group and a product group. Caveat: Supported mainly by his own institute's surveys; only passages of the book were read.
In this section, “read” means read by the Organizational Structures series: where a line says a work, or part of one, was not read, the series did not read it.