Organizational Development.
Organizational Development (OD) is a collection of change methods that try to improve organizational effectiveness and employee well-being. OD methods value human and organizational growth, collaborative and participative processes and a spirit of inquiry. The focus is on how individuals make sense of their work environment. The change agent may take the lead in OD but there is a strong emphasis on collaboration.
These are the underlying values in most OD efforts:
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Respect for people. Individuals are perceived as responsible, conscientious and caring. They should be treated with dignity and respect.
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Trust and support. An effective and health organization is characterized by trust, authenticity, openness and a supportive climate.
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Power equalization. Effective organizations de-emphasize hierarchical authority and control
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Confrontation. Problems should be openly confronted, not swept under the rug.
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Participation. The more engaged in the decisions they are, the more people affected by a change will be committed to implementing them.
What are some OD techniques for bringing about change? Here are five.
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Survey feedback. One tool for assessing attitudes held by organizational members, identifying discrepancies among member perceptions, and solving these differences is the survey feedback. These data generated become the springboard for identifying problems and clarifying issues that may be creating difficulties for people. Particular attention is given to encouraging discussion and ensuring it focuses on issues and ideas and not on attacking individuals.
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Process consultation, PC. The purpose of PC is for an outside consultant to assist a client, usually a manager, “to perceive, understand and act upon process events” with which the manager must deal. PC is more task directed and consultants are there to “give the client insight into what is going on around him, within him and between him and other people”. They do not solve the organization’s problems but rather guide or coach the client to solve his or her own problems after jointly diagnosing what needs improvement.
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Team building. Uses high-interaction group activities to increase trust and openness among team members, improve coordinative efforts and increase team performance. Team building typically includes goal setting, development of interpersonal relations among team members, role analysis to clarify each member’s role and responsibilities, and team process analysis.
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Intergroup development. A major area of concern in OD is dysfunctional conflict between groups. Intergroup development seeks to change group’s attitudes, stereotypes and perceptions about each other. Here training sessions closely resemble diversity training, except rather than focusing on demographic differences, they focus on differences among occupations, departments or divisions within an organizations.
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Appreciative inquiry, AI. Most OD approaches are problem centered. They identify a problem or set of problems and then look for a solution. AI instead accentuates the positive, that is, AI focuses on an organization's successes rather than its problems. The AI consists of four steps. Discovery sets out to identify what people think are the organization’s strengths. Employees recount times they felt the organization worked best or when they specifically felt most satisfied with their jobs. In dreaming, employees use information from the discovery phase to speculate on possible futures, such as what the organization will be like in 5 years. In design, participants find a common vision of how the organization will look in the future and agree on its unique qualities. For the fourth step, participants seek to define the organization’s destiny or how to fulfill their dream and they typically write action plans and develop implementation strategies.