Robert Tannenbaum

"Each type of action is related to the degree of authority used by the boss and to the amount of freedom available to subordinates in reaching decisions. The actions seen on the extreme left characterize managers who maintain a high degree of control while those seen on the extreme right characterize managers who release a high degree of control."

"If they can see them as forces that consciously or unconsciously influence their behavior, they can better understand what makes them prefer to act in a given way. And understanding this, they can often make themselves more effective."

"In recent years the areas of leadership, training, and organization have increasingly challenged theorists, researchers, and practitioners. Evidence of this has been a growing literature from many disciplines and approaches. Without self-consciously determining the long-range directions of our work, we have found ourselves challenged by these issues and contributing to this literature."

"Human relations today has its iconoclasts and believers, critics and supporters, detractors and zealots. This is not surprising; for during the past twenty years, numerous research groups have burgeoned, and many individual investigators have become most active in the field. There has been a fantastic outpouring of professional and popular books and articles, untold new or revised college and university offerings, a plethora of in-plant training courses, a growing number of training laboratories and seminars, and a seemingly ever-increasing schedule of meetings and speeches—all concerned, in whole or in part, with "human relations.""

"The term "human relations" is being used to denote a field of inquiry - one which cuts across the jurisdictional boundaries of traditional social sciences in an effort to avoid fragmented, compartmentalized, or partial approaches to human problems."

"[The human relations movement ] will bring to bear existing and newly developed theories, methods, and techniques of the relevant social sciences upon the study of inter- and intrapersonal phenomena, ranging fully from the personality dynamics of individuals at one extreme to the relations of cultures at the other."

"Leadership is interpersonal influence, exercised in a situation, and directed, through the communication process, toward the attainment of a specified goal or goals."

"Bob Tannenbaum’s intellectual work described organizational systems not as machines with interchangeable human parts, but as living communities that can be designed to enable people to grow and learn while achieving business goals. His writings, as well as his teaching and consulting, reflected the value he placed on people, and his belief that, to a great extent, leadership effectiveness derives from awareness of one’s own basic assumptions about human nature and the testing out and revision of those assumptions."

"It is obvious that the problem of human behavior with which we are dealing can not be understood in terms of psychology or any one of the social sciences alone. Is it not possible, therefore, that in attempting to follow the problem wherever it leads us, and employing whatever concepts and research techniques are relevant, we shall be able to define the problem in such a way and develop concepts and a theoretical framework of such a nature that a major contribution will be made to the foundation for an integrated social and psychological science? Whether or not this result appears possible or attractive to present scholars in these fields, we who are studying industrial relations are forced to work in this direction. It is not a case of choice alone, but of necessity, for we can not get results satisfactory to ourselves and applicable to the solution of practical problems by employing the concepts, theories, and methods of any one science."