APPLICATIONS OF TRANSORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT TO CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE RELATIONS

Abstract

INTRODUCTION At the empirical level, the concepts and methods of organizational development are rarely an explicit part of the political process that characterizes the institutional relationships between Congress and the Executive Branch. Perhaps that is because public sector organizational development (OD), at least as articulated in the literature, is conflicted. Some argue that conventional organizational development--in its values, assumptions, and methods--is contradictory to the power-oriented and political interactions between the branches (French and Bell, 1984; Stupak and Moore, 1987). Yet other argue that OD practice at the politics/administration interface--namely, the interface at the federal level between legislators, senior administrators who are political appointees, and the top-most levels of the career service--is substantially ahead of the literature (Golembiewski 1985). No one disputes the fact that OD at the politics/administration interface is enormously complicated in the face of powerful, competing constitutional, political and historical forces. Contemporary relations between Congress and the Executive Branch are not always effective in addressing national issues. Indeed, the process by which the federal government arrives at and carries out policy decisions is a major source of public and governmental dissatisfaction in recent years (Rivlin, 1991). The explanations range from divided party government, to outmoded institutional roles and structures, to congressional micromanagement, to inadequate political and career leadership, and to the politics of the budget process and the increasing federal deficit. Irrespective of the degree of effectiveness, Congress and the Executive Branch are both independent and interdependent--separate institutions with separate and shared powers. Each expends increasing time and resources dealing with the other in transactions designed to make and implement policy. Neither alone has the power, capacity or resources to provide substantive solutions to complex social problems. This analysis will argue that these characteristics of institutional relationships between Congress and the Executive Branch make the emerging body of planned change knowledge and practice known as transorganizational development (Cummings, 1984; Boje and Wolfe, 1989; Motamedi, 1985) applicable at a cross-institutional level to congressional-executive relations. The purpose of the analysis is to understand the concept and methods of transorganizational development using a study issued by the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA), titled Beyond Distrust: Building Bridges Between Congress and the Executive (NAPA, 1992). The thesis is that (1) at the interface between Congress and the Executive Branch, issue-specific transorganizational systems of varying degrees of effectiveness are formed and that (2) transorganizational development is an appropriate intervention to improve these interbranch systems that are beyond familiar politics and administration dichotomies. If applied to issue-specific cases of congressional-executive relations, the transorganizational development strategy could yield powerful results for the institutions, the policy results, and for theory building in public sector organizational development. Accordingly, the discussion has three main parts: (1) a conceptual scheme for explaining transorganizational systems and the practice of transorganizational development; (2) an overview of the NAPA study, including a description of the ten case studies of congressional-executive relations as empirical background for developing the transorganizational development strategy; and (3) consideration of initial implications and conclusions from the use of transorganizational development as a strategy for producing more effective relations between the branches. TRANSORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT The concepts of transorganizational systems (TS) and transorganizational development (TD) originate in the organizational behavior literature. …

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