Page 111 - DMGT520_ORGANIZATION_CHANGE_AND_DEVELOPMENT

Organization Change and Development

Notes 7.8 Sensitivity Training

Sensitivity training is a method of laboratory training where an unstructured group of individuals
exchange thoughts and feelings on a face-to-face basis. Sensitivity training helps give insight
into how and why others feel the way they do on issues of mutual concern. Training in small
groups in which people develop a sensitive awareness and understanding of themselves and of
their relationships with others. Sensitivity training is based on research on human behavior that
came out of efforts during World War II to ascertain whether or not an enemy’s core beliefs and
behavior could be modified by the application of certain psychological techniques. These
techniques have been gradually perfected over the years by efforts of business and industry
leaders to persuade people to buy products, including the radio and television industry to
ascertain how an audience might be habituated to certain types of programming.

Kurt Lewin is credited with being the ‘father’ of sensitivity training in the United States. Laboratory
Training began in 1946 when Kurt Lewin and his staff at the Research Center for Group Dynamics
at Massachusetts Institute of Technology were training community leaders. A workshop was
developed for the leaders to learn about leadership and to discuss problems. At the end of each
date the researchers discussed privately what behaviors and group dynamics they had observed.
The leaders asked permission to sit in on these feedback sessions. Reluctant at first, the researchers’
family agreed. Thus the first T-group was formed in which people reacted to information about
their own behavior.

Tavistock Clinic, an outgrowth of the Tavistock Institute of Medical Psychology, founded in
1920 in London, initiated sensitivity training in the United Kingdom in 1932, under the headship
of a psychiatrist John Rawlings Rees. Dr. Rees conducted tests on American and British soldiers
to ascertain whether, under conditions of induced and controlled stress, groups could be made
to behave erratically. In particular they wanted to know whether people would let go even
firmly held beliefs under ‘peer pressure’ to conform to a predetermined set of ‘popular’ beliefs.
This Tavistock method was similar to those procedures used in the mental hospitals’ to correct
the attitudes of prisoners; where, it was called re-education. Sensitivity training evolved in the
United States of America; at Stanford’s Research Institute’s Center for the Behavioral Sciences, at
the Sloan School at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, mid at the various National
Training Laboratories (NTLs), where concepts popularly known as ‘T-Groups’ (therapy/groups)
and ‘sensitivity training’ were developed.
A controlled stress situation is created by a group leader (‘facilitator’) with the ostensible goal of
achieving a consensus or agreement which has, in reality, been predetermined. By using peer
pressure in gradually increasing increments, up to and including yelling at, cursing at, and
isolating the holdouts, weaker individuals were intimidated into caving in, they emerge with a
new value structure in place, and the goal is achieved. The method was refined and later
popularized by other schools of behavioral science, such as Ensalen Institute, the NTL Institute
for Applied Behavioral Sciences, and the Western Training Laboratories in Group Development.

Sensitivity training is a type of experience-based learning in which participants work together
in a small group over an extended period of time learning through analysis of their own
experiences. The primary setting is the T Group (T for training) in which a staff member sets up
an ambiguous situation which allows participants to choose the roles they will play while
observing and reacting to the behavior of other members and in turn having an impact on them.
The perceptions and reactions are the data for learning. T-Group theory emphasizes each
participant’s responsibility for his own learning, the staff person’s role of facilitating examination
and understanding, provision for detailed examination required to draw valid generalizations,
creation of authentic interpersonal relationships which facilitate honest and direct communication,
and the development of new skills in working with people. Goals of sensitivity training are to
allow participants to gain a picture of the impact that they make on others and to facilitate the

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