Organisation behaviour: The use of organisation theory in training

In the first article in this series Pat Terry showed that current organisation theory is very much concerned with the organisation within its changing environment. The successful organisation is the one which is able to predict, sense and analyse the implications of changes in the environment and adapt its products, structures, systems and relationships to cope with these changes. Change and coping with it is then a theme of organisation theory and it is also an increasingly dominant thread in the field of training itself. Training can roughly be divided into two areas: • training people to do their current jobs better, including preparing people for their next jobs; • equipping people to manage/cope with change. Enough has already been written on the former and we propose in this article to concentrate on the latter. Before doing so, however, we wish to explore the dynamics of organisational change and the key importance of diagnosis in determining what kinds of change interventions, training and other, are necessary in order to create and maintain a healthy, adaptive and effective organisation.