Organisational Development Meaning, Features, Evolution, Components, Objectives

Organization Development (OD) is a planned process of change in an organization’s culture through the utilization of behavioral science technology, research, and theory. OD refers to a long-range effort to improve an organization’s problem-solving capabilities and its ability to cope with changes in its external environment with the help of external or internal behavioral-scientist consultants.

OD is an effort: Planned, organization-wide, and managed from the top, to increase organization effectiveness and health through planned interventions in the organization’s “processes,” using behavioral science knowledge.

The Organisational Development field is based on knowledge from behavioural science discipline such as psychology, sociology, social psychology, anthropology, politics, system and organisation theory and organisational behavioural. In a simple way, Organisational Development is a systematic process for applying behavioural science, principles and practices in organisation to increase individual and organisational effectiveness.

No single acceptable definition of Organisational Development exists. Therefore the definitions part of Organisational Development is divided into two parts viz., early definition and more recent definition.

Organisational development is planned, organisation wide, managed from top to increase organisational effectiveness and health through planned interventions is the organisation processes using knowledge of the behavioural science. :Beckhard, 1969

Organisational development is a response to change a complex educational strategy intended to change the beliefs, attitudes values, and structure of organisations so that they can better adopt to new technologies, markets, and- challenges, and the dizzying rate of change itself. :Bennis, 1969

Features

Use of Change Agent:

The organisational development is that, it utilises a change agent (Catalyst) to guide the change. The change agents are normally process agents or consultants to guide the groups to an effective group process. These process agents cannot be termed as the experts to tell the group what to do.

Learning through Experience:

Organisational behaviour enables an individual to learn through experience. One can adopt new behavioural pattern through experience. It is a self-motivated process, as it is said,” Experience without learning is more than learning without experience.”

Group Process:

More importance is given to group activities rather than individuals. Thus, it focuses on the improvement of group performance. Organisations have developed various ways to improve the interpersonal relations, discussion between the groups, intergroup functional conflicts, formation of team, etc., so as to help develop the capabilities of an individual to have long-lasting personal relations and intergroup communication.

Action Research:

This process in organisational development is to do research study of various work situations. This method of study is conducted on actual work situations to understand the problematic areas and remedying it accordingly, to improve the performance of an organisation.

Attention on the Entire Organisation:

Organisational development gives attention to the entire organisation to enable the environment in the organisation to reinforce the employees to learn whatever the programme specifies it. This learning is different from the traditional training programme that emphasises a small group or a particular job.

Contingency Oriented:

Organisational development is basically determined on situation. People develop their behavioural concept according to their experience. They are, therefore, able to suggest various solutions to a problem and select a suitable one according to contingencies. Organisational research has the viability to select the correct solution to a problem, since it is flexible to solutions and contingencies, compared to any traditional approach for solving the problem.

Feedback:

This is the process by which one understands other’s views on a certain subject. The feedback by an individual helps to provide information, on the basis of which a decision can be taken. This, in a way, contributes to organisational development. For example, the participants are divided into separate groups.

A certain group takes a decision on a given subject, which is passed on to other groups to obtain different opinions. Lastly, the members of different groups come together for a live discussion; as a sequel to which a consensus and final decision are arrived at on the given subject. Needless to mention that the total process is entirely based on the feedback, received earlier.

Problem Solving:

Action research provides the data on problems faced while executing the jobs and solving them through the practical experience gained over the years. This develops an attitude of solving the problems which ultimately leads to self- sufficiency.

System Oriented:

Development of organisation is based on system approaches. The various parts of an organisation interact in such a way to give momentum for interpersonal and intergroup cooperation. The system mainly aims at proper coordination of all parts of the organisation for a better performance.

Evolution

Kurt Lewin (1898–1947) is the founding father of OD, although he died before the concept became mainstream in the mid-1950s. From Lewin came the ideas of group dynamics and action research which underpin the basic OD process as well as providing its collaborative consultant/client ethos. Institutionally, Lewin founded the “Research Center for Group Dynamics” (RCGD) at MIT, which moved to Michigan after his death. RCGD colleagues were among those who founded the National Training Laboratories (NTL), from which the T-groups and group-based OD emerged.

Kurt Lewin played a key role in the evolution of organization development as it is known today. As early as World War II (1939-1945), Lewin experimented with a collaborative change-process (involving himself as a consultant and a client group) based on a three-step process of planning, taking action, and measuring results. This was the forerunner of action research, an important element of OD, which will be discussed later. Lewin also initiated a learning method known as laboratory training, or T-groups. After Lewin’s death in 1947, his close associates helped to develop survey-research methods at the University of Michigan. These procedures became important parts of OD as developments in this field continued at the National Training Laboratories and in growing numbers of universities and private consulting-firms across the country[which?]. Leading universities offering doctoral-level degrees in OD include Benedictine University and the Fielding Graduate University.

Douglas and Richard Beckhard, while “consulting together at General Mills in the 1950s coined the term organization development (OD) to describe an innovative bottom-up change effort that fit no traditional consulting categories”.

The failure of off-site laboratory training to live up to its early promise was one of the important forces stimulating the development of OD. Laboratory training is learning from a person’s “here and now” experience as a member of an ongoing training group. Such groups usually meet without a specific agenda. Their purpose is for the members to learn about themselves from their spontaneous “here and now” responses to an ambiguous situation. Problems of leadership, structure, status, communication, and self-serving behavior typically arise in such a group. The members have an opportunity to learn something about themselves and to practice such skills as listening, observing others, and functioning as effective group members Herbert A. Shepard conducted the first large-scale experiments in Organization Development in the late fifties.[6] He also founded the first doctoral program in organizational behavior at Case Western State University, and his colleague, Robert Blake, was also influential in making the term “organizational development” a more widely recognized field of psychological research.

As formerly practiced (and occasionally still practiced for special purposes), laboratory training was conducted in “stranger groups” groups composed of individuals from different organizations, situations, and backgrounds. A major difficulty developed, however, in transferring knowledge gained from these “stranger labs” to the actual situation “back home”. This required a transfer between two different cultures, the relatively safe and protected environment of the T-group (or training group), and the give-and-take of the organizational environment with its traditional values. This led the early pioneers in this type of learning to begin to apply it to “family groups” that is, groups located within an organization. From this shift in the locale of the training site and the realization that culture was an important factor in influencing group members (along with some other developments in the behavioral sciences) emerged the concept of organization development.

Components

• Led and supported by top management: Top management must lead and actively encourages the change effort. Top management must initiate the improvement journey and be committed to seeing it through.
• Long-term effort: It means that organization change and development take time. It is more accurate to describe improvement as a never-ending of continuous change.
• Visioning process: Through this process organization members develop a viable, coherent, and shared pictures of the nature of the product and services the organization offered.
• Learning process: It means those interacting, listening, and self-examining process that facilitates individual, team, and organizational learning.
• Empowerment process: It means that leadership behavior and human resource practices that enable organization members to develop and use their talents as fully as possible.
• Problem-solving process: It refers to the ways organization members diagnose the situation, solve problems, make decisions, and take actions on problems, opportunities, and challenges in the organization’s environment and its internal functioning.
• Liberation Management: Liberation management is that contemporary bureaucratic structures with their functional specialties and rigid hierarchies are all wrong for the demands of today’s fast-paced marketplace.
• By ongoing collaborative management: One of the most important things to manage in organizations is the culture. The prevailing pattern of the values, attitudes, beliefs, assumptions, activities, norms, and artifacts affect organization activates.
• Using the consultant-facilitators role: It conveys our beliefs that leaders can benefit from seeking professional assistance in planning and implementing OD initiatives.
• By intact work teams and other configurations: It recognizes that teams can contribute to accomplishing works in organizations. The most prevalent forms of teams in organizations are intact work teams consisting of superiors and subordinates with a specific job to perform.
• Action research: It means the participative model of collaborative and iterative diagnosis and taking action in which the leader, organization members, and OD practitioners work together to defined and resolve problems and opportunities.

Objectives

• To increase commitment, self-direction and self-control.
• To increase openness of communication among people.
• To encourage the people who are at the helm of affairs or close to the point of actual action to make the decisions regarding their issues through collaborative effort.
• To encourage confrontation regarding organisational problems with a view to arriving at effective decisions.
• To involve the members in the process of analysis and implementation.
• To enhance personal enthusiasm and satisfaction levels.
• To develop strategic solutions to problems with higher frequency.
• To increase the level of trust and support among employees.
• To increase the level of individual and group responsibility in planning and execution.