Toward a theory of organization congruent with primary group concepts

The bewildering maze of interdependencies and interrelationships among individuals, the groups to which they belong, and the organizations of which these groups are units is just beginning to be traced out. Personality and primary‐group theory on the one hand and organization theory on the other provide conceptual frameworks for these studies. But though it is intuitively felt that the group and the organization are parts of a continuum, these two systems have been approached from widely divergent conceptual angles. As a result, there is a gap between organization theory and primary‐group theory which few researchers have attempted to bridge. This paper proposes to bridge the gap by using primary‐group theory a s a basis on which to construct a theory of organization, and describes a test of the proposed theory.