What is organization development?

Organization Development (OD) is a planned effort of change, systemwide managed from the top, to increase organizational effectiveness and health through planned interventions of the organization's members.

Change can also occur at four levels - the individual, the group, the entire organization, and across several organizations.

Organization development (OD) is a rapidly growing profession that uses a pragmatic and values-based consulting approach to assist organizations. OD is concerned with planned change but strongly values humanistic and democratic methods of change, giving equal importance to the processes and the results. This "stakeholder" approach to evaluation is a crucial aspect of the values that underpin OD. This essentially involves the people involved with the process having equal control over the direction the change takes and how it is shown to be successful or not.

The contemporary field of organization development began to emerge following World War II when the dynamic economic conditions and the international political situation profoundly impacted the need for developing more effective management systems in the public and private sectors. Because the problems of these systems were both complex and compelling, institutions needed to find better ways to confront them. In response to the demand for more effective ways of managing in the turbulent times of the 1950s and 1960s, a knowledge base was formed by drawing on the behavioral sciences. Several significant events characterized this period. During the late 1940s, the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London began a series of socio-technical projects with the coal mining industry in Great Britain. This work was an effort to demonstrate to industry and labor that understanding human social processes could increase productivity and improve the quality of work life. Although not known as OD at the time, this applied social research was identifiably close to what we now call OD.

Organizational development aims to improve the organization's effectiveness and employees' well-being. It tries to move the organization to a different level of functioning, one which is more effective, humane, and relevant to the times in both short and long-term objectives/goals. Many organizations have multiple goals, some of which conflict with others. The achievement of some goals may involve unacceptable costs in terms of human resources. The goals of some parts of the organization may conflict with those of another part. Goals for changes in the external environment may make specific functioning methods obsolete. All these issues and more need to be raised by an OD practitioner working with a client to establish clear goals for change. In general, today's enterprises have a mix of goals. They are trying to survive in a turbulent environment by meeting the (often changing) requirements of various external clients or constituencies. They must operate cost-effectively to remain financially viable. They have some ideas about how employees should be treated. These goals are often partially in conflict. To be effective, it is beneficial to distinguish between terminal goals (the final state to be achieved) and instrumental goals (a state to be attained as a means to something else). The more an organization can clarify its goals, the easier it is to plan appropriate action. OD often utilizes a general systems model to describe the organization's situation at the beginning of efforts for change. This provides a picture of where the organization is and where it is trying to go, around which the planning of specific actions is built.

Organization development core principles are:

1. Respect for the worth of the individual, which assumes that people are worthy in their own right and that it is possible to hold and maintain this value during periods of stress or disorganization.

2. Empowerment and alignment: Organizations do best when their policies and practices are designed to harness the intrinsic motivation of their members and where the agenda for change is set by those who have the most to gain or lose. This is in contrast to having change imposed from outside the organization or by those higher in status.

3. A focus on the positive aspects of an organization, which is action-oriented and builds on the assumptions that solutions to problems can be found and that it is more productive to build on strengths than trying to eliminate weaknesses.

4. An understanding that organizations are complex social systems that harbor ambiguities and paradoxes. This principle leads to an intervention strategy based on an in-depth understanding of the organization and the use of potentially reversible interventions with low opportunity costs.

5. Collaboration within the system: Engaging the appropriate people in a collaborative effort increases the effectiveness of the change process. This also builds the organization's capability to solve future problems, and the change agent can learn about the forces that operate in the client's environment.

6. Experiment with new approaches to transferring knowledge and training to be more effective. There is a lack of knowledge about what works best, so different interventions and learning from each are needed.

These principles outline a set of beliefs on the nature of organizations and how the change process is best implemented in them. They ideally act as guidelines for the practitioner, but there is evidence suggesting that many do not follow these principles and are unaware of them.