Do you think people really can learn "organizational behavior"?

A student at UC Irvine put this question to me pretty hard in a first class session a number of years ago. She was quite confrontational, ane she wasn't going to sit there another minute unless I could convince her that somehow she'd be a better person for having taken the units. There are lots of interesting questions involved.

I'm a bit of an optimist. I think we can learn and grow from having good role models, from becoming more aware of the choices we have and the implications of our behavior. There are some things that are close to the surface -- habits and additudes -- and these can be altered by situations or with some effort. There are deeper things too, bordering on hereditary aspects of style which are far less easy to change, though awareness may count.

My own experience is that classroom learnings have had a huge impact on how I think about leadership, and what I do in organizational circumstances. I don't think the learning has come from lectures or reading, though commitments to being open and rather non-defensive, to involve others actively, etc. surely have their source in formative experiences in the classroom with people like Chris Argyris and Rensis Likert. It was discussions about personal integrity and what it meant with Argyris, which translated into a long quest to explore authenticity in interpersonal encounters -- starting with committed friendships, and extending in the series of partnerships and experiments in loving that my life underwent. I was deeply impacted by experience in the Humanistic Psychology movement; and I can hardly imagine what life would be like without these experiences. I've spent a career trying to encourage colleagues to genuinely trust and facilitate students in the classroom, and yet I've been so very aware that they had little experiential referent for the sorts of processes and relationships I've tried to describe.

Yes, I think people can learn to be more effective. They can build tacit skills that will impact their behavior. These come through experiential learning I believe, rather than traditional classroom methods. Students learn some from role models, a good deal from working through challening questions as they grow toward personal wisdom; they learn from skill practice.