Organizational Development

Designing Episodic Interventions

Jan Achterbergh, Dirk Vriens

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317442301
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Organisational Development
• Index: Business

Organizational Development gives readers an understanding of organizational structures and presents a new and easy-to-understand framework which describes the three dimensions of organizational interventions.

Interventions in organization often fail. This has been widely acknowledged: many books exist about the topic and many approaches are proposed to guide organizational interventions – but to no avail – so it remains difficult to design and guide them. This is the first book to (1) provide readers with an understanding of organizational structures and why it is both relevant and difficult to change them, and (2) present a model consisting of three underlying dimensions of interventions. The authors describe how this model can be used to design interventions in organizational structures.

Containing practical guidelines to show how interventions can be designed and controlled, this book should be considered essential reading for postgraduate students of organizational development, design, and change, and practitioners carrying out organizational development projects.

1

INTRODUCTION

1.1 Organizational development: designing episodic interventions

In a nutshell, this book is about a specific type of organizational development: so-called episodic interventions. In particular, the book is about episodic interventions in the structure of organizations, and the goal of the book is to present a ‘3-D’ model that helps to understand and flexibly design episodic interventions in organizational structures.

To appreciate the above topic and goal of the book, we want to start this introduction with a brief, preliminary explanation of our perspective on organizations, structures, and (episodic) interventions. Explaining our ideas about these concepts is for a large part what we set out to do in this book, so a full appreciation can only be arrived at at the end of the book. Here, we just want to provide a rough sketch of these concepts to be able to gain an understanding of the book’s topic and goal.

1.1.1 Organizations

To start with, organizations are described as social systems delivering a societal contribution. The contribution refers to the role of organizations in society. Inspired by Aristotle’s ethics and politics, we’ll say that in modern society, organizations can positively contribute to the well-being of societal members. They can do so: (1) by means of the societally valuable products or services they provide, (2) by means of providing non-product or non-service-related positive side effects such as employment or the well-being of employees, and (3) by making sure that negative side effects (e.g. pollution, inequality) are avoided as much as possible. Of course, not all organizations define their own contribution in this way, and in fact, many ‘contribute’ to society in a negative way – e.g. by providing value-less products or services, by not caring about positive side effects, or by creating negative side effects. Even though many of these latter organizations exist, and even though much of what we have to say about episodic interventions will also help such organizations – we have organizations in mind striving to deliver a ‘positive’ societal contribution – we’ll refer to this positive contribution as ‘rich meaningful survival’ (see Chapter 2, or Achterbergh and Vriens, 2010, for an elaboration of the societal contribution of organizations).

Organizations deliver their societal contribution as a social system, i.e. as a system of interlocking interactions. Although it takes some time and effort to really understand organizations as systems of interactions (cf. Giddens, 1979; Luhmann, 1984; Chapter 2 in this volume) the basic idea is simple: it means that organization members interact with each other and thereby realize the organization’s contribution. It also means that an organization is seen as the (evolving) set of these interactions. So, for instance, it is by means of such joint interactions of organization members over time that organizational goals (which express the organization’s contribution to society) are set, and that primary processes realizing these goals are performed. All the interactions relevant for realizing the organization’s contribution are part of the organization as a system of interactions, as a social system.

The interactions of organization members, by means of which the organization’s contribution is set and realized, are influenced by several factors. For instance, the interactions of organization members depend on the tasks these members are assigned. For example, the organizationally relevant interactions an employee of the ‘painting’ department in a furniture factory engages in have to do with realizing her job as a ‘furniture painter’, so such interactions may be about the type of paint, the available equipment, the number of chairs that need to be painted, etc. She will not likely be involved in interactions about setting the long-term goals of the factory. In fact, the type of task one is assigned to defines the topics about which one interacts and also with whom one is supposed to interact. As we will argue, the way tasks are defined and related – the organization’s structure – has an important influence on organizational interaction.

Organizational interaction is also influenced by organizational goals (as interaction is always directly or indirectly related to these goals) or by organizational culture (which, for instance, provides ‘informal rules’ about how organization members should interact).

Structures, goals, and culture are examples of factors that influence organizational interaction. Following scholars on organizations as social systems, we call such factors ‘interaction premises’ – and we discuss more of these interaction premises throughout the book. Now, what is interesting here is that there is a ‘circular’ relation between interactions and interaction premises (cf. Giddens, 1979; Luhmann, 1984; Chapter 2 in this volume). That is, interactions are influenced by interaction premises, as we have just explained, but these interaction premises are themselves also partly shaped by means of interaction. For instance, the structure of an organization co-determines interaction, but the structure itself is made by organization members who interacted about what an appropriate structure might be. And as a result of that interaction, these members decide to define and relate tasks in a particular way, thus shaping the structure, i.e. shaping an interaction premise. The same holds for goals – they are decided upon in interaction, and once ‘in place’, they act as anchors for further interaction.

So, as shown in Figure 1.1, the organization’s contribution is delivered in interaction (A), and this interaction is influenced by interaction premises (such as structure, goals, or culture – B). Moreover, these premises themselves are shaped by interaction (C).

FIGURE 1.1 Interactions, interaction premises, and the organization’s societal contribution

Besides the view that the relation between interactions and interaction premises is a circular one, one of mutual dependence, we also want to stress that it is necessarily a ‘continuous’ relation. That is, once particular interaction premises are ‘in place’, it is not certain that these premises will continue to condition the interactions in such a way that they smoothly realize the organization’s societal contribution. In fact, due to all kinds of unforeseen circumstances or developments, it may turn out that certain goals should change – e.g. because of a change in demand – or that the way in which certain tasks are defined and related turns out to be inefficient and should be altered. As we will argue, this uncertainty is fundamental for organizations, and the best one can do is to experiment with interaction premises. That is, one can decide to choose some set of goals per hypothesis, realize them by means of interaction, and hope that the organization’s contribution is viably secured by this set of goals. One should monitor the appropriateness of the chosen goals and alter them if necessary. The same holds for the way tasks are defined and related. One may select a particular structure (because one thinks it is an appropriate one), implement it, monitor it, and change it if it turns out to harbour inefficiencies. That organizations can never be certain about the goals or structures they select, and hence need to experiment, seems to be managerial common sense. Here, we just want to stress that interaction premises are subject to continuous experimentation – and that this experimental change takes effect in interaction.

1.1.2 Organizational structures and their development

Based on these ideas, we can introduce the notion of development as the intended improvement of interaction premises – as changing interaction premises in such a way that they better support organizational interaction in realizing the organization’s societal contribution. In particular, the development of the structure of organizations (as a form of organizational development) is the intended improvement of the way tasks are defined and related. Organizational (and structural) development usually comes about in experimentation (as described previously), and can hence be regarded as inherent to the continuous relation between interaction and interaction premises.

Structural development can sometimes become problematic in organizations. In fact, it can become so problematic that what we call ‘episodic interventions’ are needed. However, before we can understand what these interventions are and why they are required, we first need to gain some idea of why structural development may be problematic.

To this end, consider someone – let’s call him Josef – working in some organization (for the moment, it does not matter whether this organization is a bank, a hospital, or some factory) who has been assigned to a job which has the following characteristics:

– The job is coupled to many or all of the organization’s products or services (e.g. Josef, as a nurse, treats all types of patients – e.g. having different kinds of illnesses; or Josef, as a worker in a factory producing furniture, performs production activities for all different classes of furniture).

– The job comprises only a tiny fraction of all the activities needed to produce these products or services (e.g. Josef the nurse is only allowed to help with washing patients, Josef the furniture factory employee’s job is just to drill holes in pieces of wood).

– The input that is needed to perform the job depends on different other workers that have equally small jobs (e.g. Josef the nurse awaits a sign from some other nurse if a patient is ready to be washed, the job of Josef the driller depends on the arrival of pieces of wood from some other worker).

– For the preparation (planning, tooling) of the activities, the job depends on other persons working in equally small jobs in other units of the organization (e.g. the nurse receives a plan of all patients who need to be washed during a particular day; the driller receives a similar plan and is dependent on the machine maintenance carried out by others).

– If something goes wrong in the production process that Josef can fix himself, he is not allowed to deal with this problem. For regulatory purposes, the job depends on other ‘managers’ who fix the problem for Josef (e.g. if a patient is being seen by a doctor when Josef arrives, the washing activities should be rescheduled or left to someone else; the need to replace worn-out drilling equipment should reported to a regulator, who instructs others to replace it).

– Josef’s job is supervised by managers who only monitor a fraction of the tasks involved in the primary process and who themselves are monitored by yet other managers. In Josef’s organization, a hierarchy of managers is in place.

– Josef is required to produce a particular output of a particular quality per time unit (e.g. the nurse should wash 50 patients a day, which should take no more than 5 minutes per patient).

Now, the structures consisting of jobs like Josef’s are complex networks of highly dependent small jobs with a large hierarchy of managers (cf. Mintzberg, 1983; de Sitter, 1994). Typical examples are bureaucratic organizations, like many general hospitals, large governmental organizations, or functionally concentrated factories.

In general, such structures tend to have several negative effects. They negatively affect employee well-being and production effectiveness and efficiency. Although it takes some theoretical effort to explain these effects in detail, we can already intuitively understand that these structures cause such problems. Without being thorough and complete, it can already be appreciated that a complex network of many highly dependent jobs and a hierarchy of managers is error-prone, as every dependency relation is a possible source of errors. And, as jobs lack the regulatory potential to deal with these errors, these errors tend to affect many other jobs in the network. Second, if disturbances need to be dealt with by means of separate managers, it takes time to repair problems. And the more removed these managers are from the jobs in which the disturbances occur, the more difficult it becomes to think of regulatory measures that do justice to the specific circumstances in which the error occurred. Similarly, the less overview such managers have of the complex network of production jobs, the more difficult it becomes to think of measures that are not just local sub-optimizations – i.e. measures that may fix a local problem, but that lead to a disturbance in another part of the organization. Being error-prone and lacking regulatory potential, then, is problematic for production time and product quality.

Structures with the jobs described previously not only have a negative effect on production time and product quality, they also affect the well-being of employees. For instance, as employees are involved in only a tiny part of the complete process and perform small activities for many products or clients, it is difficult for them to have an overview of the whole production process and to have an idea of the end products and services they contribute to. This may lead to alienation. As a nurse, for instance, Josef sees many patients with respect to only a very tiny aspect of the care they receive. In this case, he can neither picture the whole process of providing care nor connect to a patient and appreciate the effect of the care that is delivered. In such cases, care professionals...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Interventions in Organizational Structures: Theoretical Underpinnings
• Part II Designing Interventions in Organizational Structures
• References
• Index