Abstract
Our point of departure in this paper has been that an organization can fruit fully be described as a system of organizational units rather than of individual roles. Whether or not two units in such a system can be described as connected can be determined, for example, by the frequency of communication between them. An account of the units in the system and the relations between them pro vides one aspect of a description of the organization's structure. Over and above this, the organization's way of functioning as a system can also be described; one of the relevant variables here is intraorganizational strain. Some writers have shown that there is a connection between intraorganizational strain and the organization's degree of goal satisfaction. In this paper we suggest some hypotheses on the origins of intraorganizational strain and have assumed that behavior in a system of organizational units can be explained by an analogy to theories con cerning interindividual systems. In conclusion our argument is illustrated by some examples from an empirical study.
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