The Managerial Grid: Key Orientations For Achieving Production Through People

by Robert R. Blake and Jane Srygley Mouton

Binding: Hardcover Publisher: Gulf Publishing Co. Date published: 1975 ISBN-13: 9780872014749 ISBN: 0872014746 This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0872014746
• ISBN13: 9780872014749
• Release Date: September 1972
• Publisher: Gulf Publishing Company
• Length: 340 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A brilliant analysis of managerial behavior

I have been using the Blake & Mouton managerial grid for years, but only recently did I discover that they wrote a book about it! It has been through 19 printings, and it is excellent. The managerial grid is visually represented by a quadrant with "task orientation" on the X axis and "social orientation" on the Y axis. A person might be in the lower right quadrant indicating an obsession with getting the job done and indifference to people and relationships--the command-and-control mentality. Or he might be in the upper left quadrant indicating that he considers relationships indispensable and productivity expendable--the country club mentality. He could also be anywhere on the grid. This seems so obvious and intuitive that I accepted my own guidance in terms of interpreting the grid. That was my loss, until I found this book. The beauty of this book is that the authors, using a tremendous amount of research, describe the behaviors, assumptions, and motivations of managers and employees in all the grid's quadrants. The one I found most informative was the middle-of-the-road managers. The authors clearly delineate how such people obsess on safety, how they take the pulse of their organization before they take a stand. They dismantle conflict without any concern for getting to its root cause or using it as an opportunity to learn something about the opposing forces in their organization. These middle folk only give lip service to creativity, and their highest priority is simply to fit in and to be known as a "good people." This is an extraordinarily valuable book, and the fact that it is available used, for a penny a copy, is one of life's little ironies.