The Character of Organizations: Using Personality Type in Organization Development [Paperback]

William Bridges (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 27, 2000

Just as people have personalities, Bridges explains organizations have character.

Editorial Reviews

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, Ph.D., principal of William Bridges & Associates, has been a leader in the field of transition management since the publication of his best-selling book TRANSITIONS in 1980. A frequent presenter and keynote speaker, he has worked for over twenty years with organizations and individuals to help them manage more positively through change. Bridges and his firm have provided assessment, training, and consulting services to hundreds of organizations, including Amoco, AT&T, Intel, Kaiser Permanente, Motorola, and the U.S. Veterans Administration. Author also of MANAGING TRANSITIONS, JOBSHIFT, and CREATING YOU & CO., he has become one of the most widely read and quoted experts on what's happening to jobs in today's organizations. He has been listed by the Wall Street Journal as one of the top ten independent executive development presenters in America.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Nicholas Brealey Publishing; Updated Edition edition (June 27, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0891061495
• ISBN-13: 978-0891061496
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #289,087 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

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

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Myers-Briggs for companies - surprisingly effective., November 6, 2002

By 

Nigel Seel (Wells, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Character of Organizations: Using Personality Type in Organization Development (Paperback)

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.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Character of Organizations, August 28, 2000

By 

Ruth Morton, Ph.D. (Gladstone, OR USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Character of Organizations: Using Personality Type in Organization Development (Paperback)

If a deeper understanding of a company or organization is important to you, this book could help! Conceptual in nature, Bridges' book outlines a framework for understanding different types of organization personalities, or character. He provides a quick assessment instrument, succinct descriptions of the 16 types in his framework, and poignant organizational examples for each. He relates this framework to stages of organizational life cycle, the three phases of organizational transition (about which he has written prolifically), and individual type and leadership. This book does not provide "how to" or checklists for action, but it leads me to important questions and possible implications about: what character the organization is and why, the transition process required to help the organization develop different character, movement from one stage of the life cycle to another, the role of leadership in doing so, and how one's individual personality relates to the character of the organization. With each reading I uncover something more or different in this gem of a book. Although the framework and assessment instrument have not been subjected to statistical analysis, The Character of Organizations is an enormously thought provoking and helpful resource.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Genuine Classic, August 28, 2000

By 

Chris Edgelow (Edmonton, AB Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Character of Organizations: Using Personality Type in Organization Development (Paperback)

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.