Organization Development

A Practitioner's Guide for OD and HR

Mee-Yan Cheung-Judge, Linda Holbeche

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781789667929
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Organisational Development
• Index: Business

Organization Development (OD) is key to ensuring that organizations and their people can adapt to and engage in ongoing change in today's fast-paced and competitive world. How can those responsible for managing change determine the most appropriate course of action for their organization's needs and maximize capability? Written by two of the leading experts in the field, Organization Development is an essential guide to the theories, practices, tools and techniques for achieving success. It explores the role of HR in relation to OD, and connected areas such as organization design, building organizational agility and resilience, and culture change. Alongside international case studies from organizations including Ernst & Young, Nationwide, Lockheed Martin and the University of Sheffield, UK, this revised third edition of Organization Development contains new chapters on building an adaptive culture of learning and innovation and organization health and 'use of self'. With fresh material on digitization, OD in SMEs, and competence profiles, this is an indispensable handbook to understanding, communicating and implementing organization development approaches for both experienced practitioners and students.

PART ONE

A practitioner’s guide for Organization Development

Section 1

OD history and theory overview

• Chapter 1: What is OD? Its brief history
• Chapter 2: A theory overview

This section gives an overview of the history and development of Organization Development (OD) and the theoretical base of our practice. The field of OD is often not well understood nor is there a consensus on its origin. The field grew out of the values of the early founders, their ‘sense-making’ effort to understand human behaviour in the aftermath of the Second World War, and the research findings of applied behavioural science. As with other academic fields, OD’s development was not a linear process or systematically planned by those early significant players. There was an emergence of different thinkers from various US academic institutions; based on their values, their academic training, their desire to make an impact in the context of their environment, they headed down a particular path – trying to find out how organizations work and how that impacts on individuals within the organization, and the dynamic interplay between individuals, groups, between groups and within the whole system. Then both by chance and intent, these diverse groups of academics and practitioners began to converge through conferences and network events to exchange their findings. The result was an emergence of a significant field of knowledge, and OD was born. This field of knowledge has the characteristics of a movement started by diverse groups of individuals and institutions taking their different parts to build a body of knowledge to form the common basis of the field, which eventually become ‘theory in action’ within a very clear value framework.

While the diverse paths lead to a continuous debate about the boundaries of the field, there is clarity about certain key characteristics of the field: a dual concern to use processes derived from applied behavioural science to help an organization to be highly effective in what it sets out to do (optimal performance), while ensuring the health of the organization continues to improve; that the design of these processes is based on principles of OD from research data, the theoretical orientation that shapes the conceptual and practice framework of the field and its strong value base; and the importance of the ‘use of self’ for all practitioners. The field is practised within ‘a living system’ (organizations are made up of human beings), therefore understanding ourselves as a living system and the various dimensions of being human – psychological, social, emotional, personality preference, life history and relationship orientation, etc – is a prerequisite for being an effective intervener in any social system. These characteristics also point to the trademarks of being an OD practitioner (ODP). See Chapter 10 on OD practitioners (ODPs).

Chapter 2 focuses on the core theories that shape the field and practices. Theory, as expressed by the sentiment of Kurt Lewin, is a practical matter, as ‘there is nothing as practical as a theory’ – theories shape practice and practice builds theory. Given there are around 100 theories that shape ODPs’ practices, it was a risk to focus on eight key ones only. However, they are the foundational ones – demanding the practitioners to shift their paradigm in the way they work. How big that shift is will depend on what dominant approaches the practitioners have been anchoring their work in. Finally, a particular strand of behavioural economic studies that shaped the way in which ODPs approach behaviour change will be covered not in this section but in Chapter 9.

These two chapters are foundational in building our understanding of the field of OD. Pay attention to how such key theories may shape our intervention practice.

01

What is OD? Its brief history

Organization Development (OD) is not a well-understood field. Often questions like: ‘What is it?’ will pop up among clients. Even many of the OD practitioners feel that while they know intuitively what the field is about, it is hard to articulate what OD is. Through time, a mystique has built up around the term; even the debate among the veterans in the field has filled the pages in OD publications. I believe it is time to seek clarity about what OD is, as without clarity it is hard to accumulate knowledge, conduct research, facilitate debates and work towards building a vibrant future for the field.

In this chapter, I would like to give an overview of the following areas:

1. the goals, characteristics, and definition of OD;
2. a brief history of OD;
3. critical founders who shaped the OD field;
4. how the field got its name;
5. values that have informed OD practice;
6. the role of the OD practitioner.

By covering these areas, I hope to help you, the reader, to be more confident in articulating clearly to your clients what the field of OD is, what OD intends to bring to the workplace, and how its core characteristics make it an indispensable field of knowledge to those who want to see organizations run effectively and humanely, especially during times of turbulent changes.

The goals, characteristics and definition of Organization Development

Edgar Schein (1965) declared that all organizations, regardless of size and type, face two types of problems:

• continuous external adaptation to a rapidly changing environment;
• corresponding internal integration that will support the success of the external adaptation.

Schein calls the organization’s ability to cope with changes and adapt effectively the ‘adaptive coping cycle’, which is a sign of organization effectiveness. These two dimensions help to lock the relationship between OD practitioners and strategists. While the strategists support the senior leaders to determine how the organization should adapt externally in order to remain viable, OD practitioners support senior leaders to ensure there is a corresponding internal development to support the delivery of those identified external ambitions. As twins to the strategists, OD practitioners are there to help the organization to prepare itself internally to deliver the challenging external ambitions.

The following definitions reveal the heart of the practice of OD, which is to improve the functioning of individuals, teams and the total organization:

• OD is a systematic process for applying behavioural science principles and practices in organizations to increase individual and organization effectiveness (French and Bell, 1999).
• OD (and its associated technology) is a process directed at organization improvement (Margulies, 1978).
• OD is all the planned interventions to increase organization effectiveness and health (Beckhard, 1969).
• OD is about building and maintaining the health of the organization as a total system (Schein, 1988a,b).
• Organization revitalization is achieved through synthesizing individual, group and organizational goals so as to provide effective service to the client and community while furthering quality of product and work life (Lippitt and Lippitt, 1975).
• The goal of OD is to enhance organizational effectiveness by attending to both human and organizational needs (Rainey, Tolbert and Hanafin, 2006).
• OD is an organizational process for understanding and improving any and all substantive processes an organization may develop for performing any tasks and pursuing any objectives (Vaill, 1989).

If ODPs are to take these aims seriously, then their commitment will be not just to improve a situation but to ensure the improvement is sustainable – ie to make change synonymous with development. Any process designed by OD practitioners needs to have the added component of equipping the organization members to learn how to sustain that development without continuous external help. It is this point that demarcates the field from other consultancy approaches.

This second prong of the goal of OD was also confirmed by the following two definitions:

• OD is all the activities engaged in by managers, employees and helpers that are directed towards building and maintaining the health of the organization as a total system (Schein, 1988a,b).
• OD is a long-range effort to improve an organization’s problem solving and renewal processes... with the assistance of a change agent, or catalyst, and the use of the theory and technology of applied behavioural science, including action research (French and Bell, 1999).

Based on the above definitions, the characteristics of OD and OD practitioners can be summarized as:

• We are ‘process’ experts to improve any substantive organization processes (eg planning, group meetings and relationships, leaders and staff relationship, effective communication, etc).
• We focus on the ‘total system’ perspective even if we are asked to look at a specific organization issue.
• We aim to improve an organization’s problem solving and renewal processes.
• The primary practitioners of OD are the organization’s leaders/managers (as they are the custodians of organization health) and not HR/OD professionals.
• OD practitioners are ‘helpers and catalysts’ to the leaders of the organization who are the primary practitioners of OD.
• We use the technology of applied behavioural science to suppo...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART ONE A practitioner’s guide for Organization Development
• Section 1: OD history and theory overview
• 1 What is OD? Its brief history
• 2 Theories and practices of OD: a theory overview
• Section 2: OD cycle of work
• 3 Theories and practices of OD: the OD cycle and the entry and contracting phase
• 4 Theories and practices of OD: the diagnostic phase
• 5 Theories and practices of OD: the intervention phase
• 6 Theories and practices of OD: the evaluation phase
• Section 3: OD and change
• 7 Living at the edge of chaos and change
• 8 Back-room and front-room change matters
• 9 Can behavioural change be made easy?
• Section 4: The Organization Development practitioner
• 10 The Organization Development practitioner
• 11 Power and politics in Organization Development
• Section 5: Additional thoughts
• 12 What is an organization? What is organization health?
• 13 How to build up your presence and impact on organization life
• PART TWO HR in relation to OD: theory and practice
• 14 HR in relation to OD
• 15 Organization Design
• 16 Transformation and culture change
• 17 Building organizational agility and resilience
• 18 A culture conducive to innovation and learning
• 19 Building the context for employee engagement
• 20 Developing effective leadership
• Postscript – towards a better tomorrow
• References and further reading
• Index