Argyris, Chris

His Career

Argyris was born in Newark, New Jersey, on July 16, 1923, to Greek immigrant parents. He grew up in Irvington, New Jersey, and served in the Signal Corps of the US Army during the Second World War, rising to the rank of Second Lieutenant. He received his B.A. in psychology (1947) at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. As an undergraduate, he met Kurt Lewin, whose work would have a strong influence on Argyris throughout his life. He went on to receive an M.A. in psychology and economics from Kansas University (1949), and a Ph.D. in organizational behaviour from Cornell University (1951), where he studied with William Foote Whyte.

Argyris served as the Beach Professor of Administrative Science and chairperson of the Department of Organization Behavior at Yale University from 1951 to 1971. He then moved to Harvard University, where he held a joint appointment at the Graduate School of Education and the Business School as the James Bryant Conant Professor of Education and Organizational Behavior. He also served on the board of directors of two strategic consulting firms, the Monitor Group and Greenwich Research Associates. He was a devoted husband and father. He and his wife, Renee, were married 63 years and had two children. He died on 16 November 2013.

His Work

Argryis was one of the members of the post–World War II generation of management scholars who did pioneering research on the human side of organization. Both Lewin and Whyte had impressed upon him the importance of observation as the basis for research, which meant, first and foremost, understanding the world through the eyes of other people. He was also [Page 56]deeply impressed by the way in which both men linked theory building and research with action for generating change. Thus, from the very beginning, Argyris believed that the best test of theory was whether it could produce a desired change in the real world.

Argyris' first major work, Personality and Organization (1957), was pioneering empirical research that illustrated the inherent conflict between the demands of the formal organization and the normal development of human beings towards greater independence and self-control. The unintended consequences of this conflict are that most organization members revert to an infantile state in order to conform to the organization's demands. Argyris was well aware of the detrimental effect of organizations on people, but he admitted, at that time, that he could envision no solution to the problem. It was the search for a solution, however, that guided Argyris throughout his career.

...