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By most accounts, what has come to be known as organization development can be traced back to a training laboratory effort that began in 1946–1947 in Bethel, Maine, at what was then known as the National Training Laboratory (NTL) in Group Development. The laboratory’s founders, Kenneth Benne, Leland Bradford, and Ronald Lippitt, were inspired to develop NTL by the dedicated work of a fourth scholar and their predecessor, Kurt Lewin. A German immigrant who had arrived in the United States in the early 1930s to escape the sociopolitical environment of his home country, Lewin was a social psychologist on the faculty at the University of Iowa. His interest was in studying patterns of group behavior, social problems, and the influence of leadership on a group. At its core, Lewin’s work was an effort to understand and create personal and social change, with the objective of building and growing democracy in society (see Benne, 1964; L. P. Bradford, 1974; Hirsch, 1987; Kleiner, 1996).

In the 1940s, with his graduate student, Ron Lippitt, Lewin studied boys’ clubs, specifically boys’ reactions to different styles adopted by group leaders. Spurred on by the implications of these results, in 1945 Lewin established a Research Center for Group Dynamics (a phrase Lewin invented; see L. P. Bradford, 1974) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

In the summer of 1946, a significant and unexpected finding occurred that dramatically changed the research and practitioner landscape at the time. It was at this time that the practices that became the T-group were discovered by Lewin and his students. The Connecticut Interracial Commission had asked Kurt Lewin to develop a workshop for community leaders in association with the Commission on Community Interrelations of the American Jewish Congress. The objective of the workshop was to assist community leaders in developing solutions to problems that they faced in their communities, specifically addressing problems in the implementation of the Fair Employment Practices Act. Participants included not only community leaders but also businesspeople, social workers, teachers, and other interested citizens. Instead of making attendees passively sit through lengthy lectures, speeches, and presentations by experts, which many of them had been expecting, organizers developed a workshop in which participatory group discussion, role playing, and teamwork would be the primary activities (Hirsch, 1987). Group leaders debated whether subgroups should be homogeneous (e.g., all teachers, all social workers) or mixed (Lippitt, 1949). These two considerations (group participation and composition) continue as key questions for the OD practitioner today.

For the researchers at the Research Center for Group Dynamics, it was an unusual opportunity to observe group processes and to understand how participants learned from their experiences in order to develop new skills that they could use when they returned to their communities. In addition, the workshop fit with the values that the researchers had espoused at the time. Kenneth Benne would later say,

I saw it was an effort to help volunteers from various parts of Connecticut to begin to see themselves as agents of change in their responsible roles as citizens. . . . It seemed to me that this was research designed to serve both the purposes of social action and the purposes of more refined and powerful methods of training people for action. (quoted in L. P. Bradford, 1974, p. 19)

As a workshop designed for both social change and social research, each subgroup had a researcher assigned to it for note-taking and observation purposes.

Each evening, following the discussion session, the researchers convened to discuss the day’s events to document observations, code interaction, and interpret group behavior. A few of the participants in the day workshops learned of these researcher meetings and asked if they could sit in and observe. The researchers agreed and opened the sessions to other participants who were free to attend if they wished.¹ The researchers continued their process of reflecting on and interpreting the participants’ actions during the day while the participants listened. At one point, one of the researchers stated that he had seen one woman, who had been a cautious and quiet participant earlier, become a more lively contributor that day as a result of being assigned to a leadership role during a role-playing activity. Rather than allowing this observation to pass without comment, the researchers invited the woman (who was present at that evening’s discussion, listening to the observation being shared) to discuss the hypothesis and to share her own interpretation. The woman agreed that, yes, it had been more enjoyable to participate as a result of being assigned to the leadership role. She found herself surprised by how much she was energized by the discussion and how much she changed from initially being uncomfortable participating to being disappointed when the discussion came to an end (Lippitt, 1949). This exchange led to a promising new pattern in which researchers reported on their observations and the participants listened, reflected, and shared their own interpretations of their own behavior.

Attendance at the evening sessions soared in subsequent days, with almost all participants attending, and this led to the researchers’ conclusion:

Group members, if they were confronted more or less objectively with data concerning their own behavior and its effects, and if they came to participate nondefensively in thinking about these data, might achieve highly meaningful learnings about themselves, about the responses of others to them, and about group behavior and group development in general. (Benne, 1964, p. 83)

Lewin seemed to know instinctively that this was a potentially powerful finding, remarking that “we may be getting hold of a principle here that may have rather wide application in our work with groups” (quoted in Lippitt, 1949, p. 116). The training group (or T-group) was born.

The following year, 1947, the first T-group session took place at the National Training Laboratory in Bethel, Maine. T-group sessions were designed to last 3 weeks and comprised approximately 10 to 15 participants and one or two trainers. In open and honest sessions in which authenticity and forthright communication were prized, group members spent time analyzing their own and others’ contributions, as well as the group’s processes. Regardless of whatever process the groups followed, the common objective of each T-group was to create interpersonal change by allowing individuals to learn about their own and others’ behavior, so that this education could be translated into more effective behavior when the participants returned home. As the word spread about the effectiveness of the T-group laboratory method, managers and leaders began to attend to learn how to increase their effectiveness in their own organizations. Attendance was aided by a BusinessWeek article in 1955 that promoted “unlock[ing] more of the potential” of employees and teams (“What Makes a Small Group Tick,” 1955, p. 40). By the mid-1960s, more than 20,000 businesspeople had attended the workshop (which had been reduced to a 2-week session), in what may be considered one of the earliest fads in the field of management (Kleiner, 1996).

The research that Lewin began has had a significant influence on OD and leadership and management research. His research on leadership styles (such as autocratic, democratic, and laissez-faire) profoundly shaped academic and practitioner thinking about groups and their leaders. His influence on his students Benne, Bradford, and Lippitt in creating the National Training Laboratory has left a legacy that lives on today as NTL continues to offer sessions in interpersonal relationships, group dynamics, and leadership development. The fields of small-group research and leadership development owe a great deal to Lewin’s pioneering work in these areas. Though the T-group no longer represents mainstream OD practice, we see the roots of this method today in organization development in team-building interventions (a topic addressed in detail in Chapter 11). Lewin’s research also influenced another tradition in the history of organization development—action research and survey feedback.