Large Group Interventions: Engaging the Whole System for Rapid Change - Hardcover

As the challenges of global competition, demands for improved quality, and increasingly shorter product life cycles become facts of daily business life, organizations find themselves under intense pressure to become more competitive. Whether they are multinational corporations, small businesses, schools, hospitals, voluntary agencies, governments, or religious institutions, they must learn how to change rapidly in order to survive in a turbulent environment. And as organizations shift from a traditional hierarchical structure to a more flexible and participative networking style, leaders need a decision-making process that will foster the involvement and commitment of all of their people - and align them to common goals. Large group interventions can provide this process, bringing as many as 2,000 employees and customers together in one location for activities as diverse as creating future direction, restructuring the organization, solving problems, and generating new ideas and products. Large Group Interventions is the first book to present and compare different large group intervention methods and describe the situations and conditions under which each might be used. Barbara Benedict Bunker and Billie T. Alban present a comprehensive overview of the twelve methods of large group interventions currently in practice. The authors describe the methods' origins, explore their differences and similarities, and present vivid examples and case studies that give the reader a firsthand account of each intervention.

Barbara Benedict Bunker is emeritus professor of psychology at the State University of New York at Buffalo. She has taught in executive development programs at Columbia, Pepperdine, and the Harvard University School of Education and has held Fulbright Lectureships in the business schools of Keio University and Kobe University in Japan.

Billie T. Alban is president of Alban and Williams, Ltd., and an internationally known management consultant whose clients include British Airways, Cathay Pacific Airways, Exxon, and Kraft/General Foods. She teaches in executive development programs at Columbia, the University of California, Los Angeles, and Pepperdine and has served on the board of the Organization Development Network.
Bunker and Alban are coauthors of Large Group Interventions from Jossey-Bass.