Discuss the major classes of organizational development interventions. What are the goals of each? Which interventions are likely to have the most lasting effects?

ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Organizational development is a long-term, systematic, and prescriptive approach to planned organizational change. Although it uses a system-wide view, it can focus on single subsystems of an organization. Organizational development applies the social and behavioral science theories and concepts to organizational change. It also uses behavioral science knowledge as the source of techniques to cause change.

The following statement by one of its key proponents describes the goals of organizational development:

(1) Enhancing congruence among organizational structure, processes, strategy, people, and culture;

(2) Developing new and creative organizational solutions; and

(3) Developing the organization’s self-renewing capacity.

The self-renewing emphasis distinguishes organizational development from other approaches to planned organizational change. Organizational development views organizations as complex social and technical systems. An organizational development effort can focus on human processes in the organization, or the organization’s design, job design, technology, and many other aspects of the organization.

A careful examination of organizational development’s goals reveals its prescriptive feature. Organizational development tries to create an organization with the flexibility to change its design according to the nature of its tasks and external environment. It builds mechanisms within the organization that let members get feedback about the state of the organization. The feedback then encourages all members to focus on continuous improvement.

Organizational development views conflict as an inevitable part of organization life. It tries to build a culture that says conflict can be positively managed to reach the organization’s goals. The culture also needs a norm that says people with knowledge, not only those in appointed decision-making roles, should have authority and influence in decision making. Organizational development asks organization members to take charge of their destiny and to be involved in the change process.