The Professional Life of Clayton Paul Alderfer

Clayton Paul Alderfer died on October 30, 2015. In addition to the people he left behind (family, friends, colleagues, and former students), Clay also bequeathed a richly varied scholarly legacy. This article introduces the reader to Alderfer’s life and work. Since Alderfer believed that one’s work is influenced by one’s stage of life, his work is presented in chronological order from early adulthood through late adulthood. What emerges is a picture of how the major intellectual themes he worked on—need theory, embedded intergroup relations, organizational diagnosis, and race relations—developed over the course of his adult life. Alderfer is presented in his own words, sentences and paragraphs excerpted from his published legacy, to minimize interpretation and maximize the reader’s exposure to the man and his ideas.

Leadership and Responses to Organizational Crisis

The tragic failure of Penn State University to effectively respond to years of child sex abuse perpetrated by Jerry Sandusky was both a breakdown of leaders and of leadership systems. Numerous individual leaders at Penn State had the knowledge, power, and interpersonal influence to effectively intervene in support of Jerry Sandusky's victims. However, fully understanding how this tragedy occurred also requires an examination of the organizational system of leadership that enabled each leader to rationalize the cover up of the sexual abuse of children. Alderfer's (2011) laws of embedded intergroup relations are useful for understanding the organizational dysfunction at Penn State; especially when those laws are integrated with other theories of organizational psychology, including the social identity maintenance theory of groupthink, the romance of leadership, and authentic leadership. The integration of these theories suggests specific strategies and tactics for preventing similar lapses of ethical behavior in the future through the development of leaders and leadership systems.