Organization Development. Donald L. Anderson

are helpful or necessary to the consultant or change agent. A consultant helping a team redefine roles and responsibilities may be doing so in an environment in which the company has acquired a competitor or quarterly results were disappointing. Part of the practitioner’s role is to sort the useful primary information from the unnecessary secondary information (or information that is unnecessary for the immediate problem). This is part of the value of these case exercises and a logic and intuition that you will develop as your skills and experience grow. Ask yourself what the client is trying to achieve, what he or she has asked of you, and what the core issues and central facts are.

      4 Similarly, in any response to a client or reaction to a case, resist the temptation to comment on everything. An OD practitioner can help to prioritize the most pressing issues and help the client sort through the complexities of organizational life. It could be that part of the reason the client has asked for help is that the number of possibilities for action are too overwhelming to decide what to do next.

      5 When you are prepared to write a response or an analysis, ask yourself whether you have addressed the central questions asked by the case and whether you have clearly stated the issues to the client. Once your response is written, could you send that, in its present form, to the client described in the case? In that regard, is the analysis professionally written and well organized to communicate unambiguously to the client? Will the client understand how and why you reached these conclusions?

      6 As you write your analysis, ask yourself how you know any particular fact or interpretation to be true and whether you have sufficiently justified your interpretation with actual data. Instead of boldly stating that “managers are not trained for their roles,” you could write, “Only 2 of 10 managers had attended a management training course in the past 5 years, leading me to conclude that management training has not been given a high priority.” The latter uses data and makes the interpretation explicit; the former is likely to invite criticism or defensiveness from a client. This does not mean that directness is not appropriate, only that it must follow from the evidence. We will describe the considerations of the feedback process in depth in this book.

      7 When you have finished your own thinking and writing about the case, and after you have had the opportunity to discuss the case and options for action with classmates, take the time to write down your reflections from the experience (Ellet, 2007). What did you learn? What principles might apply for the next time you are confronted with these choices?

      Summary

      Today’s organizations are experiencing an incredible amount of change. Organization development is a field of academic study and professional practice that uses social and behavioral science knowledge to develop interventions that help organizations and individuals change successfully. It is a field practiced in almost all kinds of organizations that you can imagine, from education to health care, from government to small and large businesses. Changes that OD practitioners address are diverse as well, including organizational structures and strategies, team effectiveness, leadership coaching, and much more. OD is not management consulting or training and development, and it is neither short term nor the mere application of a standard procedure or toolkit. OD practitioners can include many kinds of people for whom organizational change is a priority, such as managers and executives, project managers, and organizational members in a variety of roles.

      Questions for Discussion

      1 Think of a job that you have held. It may be your current job, or it may be a job that you had in the past. Now take a few moments and write down several reasons why you found that job or work environment to be a positive or rewarding experience, or several reasons why you found it to be a negative or unrewarding experience. Share your ideas with a classmate. Did you note any similarities or differences? What OD interventions discussed in Chapter 1 do you think might have been helpful in this organization?

      2 Without looking back at the definitions in this chapter, how would you describe organization development to a friend, colleague, or potential client? Now compare your description to the definitions in the chapter. How is your definition different?

      3 Have you ever participated in an organization development project or intervention? What was your experience?

      For Further Reading

      Beckhard, R. (1969). Organization development: Strategies and models. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

      Burke, W. W. (2008). A contemporary view of organization development. In T. G. Cummings (Ed.), Handbook of organization development (pp. 13–38). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

      Egan, T. M. (2002). Organization development: An examination of definitions and dependent variables. Organization Development Journal, 20(2), 59–71.

      Marshak, R. J. (2006). Organization development as a profession and a field. In B. B. Jones & R. Brazzel (Eds.), The NTL handbook of organization development and change: Principles, practices, and perspectives (pp. 13–27). San Francisco, CA: Pfeiffer.

      Case Study 1: Every Coin Has Two Sides

      Read the case below and consider the following questions:

      1 What are the sources of conflict on this team? Which of the issues are personal or interpersonal versus systemic or organizational?

      2 If you were to summarize the issues for Tom or Jared, how would you present the data back?

      3 Do you think this team can reconcile this conflict, or has this team reached a point where it is beyond repair?

      4 What do you think an organization development practitioner could do to help Jared and this team?

      In Tom’s Office

      “I have a strange situation, and I’m not sure why it’s happening. I have done some investigating myself, but I’m perplexed about what do to next, which is why I reached out to you,” Tom began.

      “Tell me more about it,” Paul asked. As an internal organization development consultant to Tom, he was used to perplexing situations and eager to hear more.

      “One of the managers on my team, Jared, is relatively new. I have four other managers who are much more tenured in my organization, but he’s been part of my group for only about 7 months. About 3 months ago, I started getting complaints from his team,” Tom said.

      “Remind me what Jared’s team does?” Paul asked.

      “Jared’s team is responsible for the relationships with our suppliers. Any time we work with a supplier to buy parts from them, we have a supplier agreement that shows their agreed service levels to us, pricing, quality levels, shipping time expectations, and so on. Jared’s team members work closely with our suppliers to monitor the quality of the products they are shipping to us and whether the supplier metrics are meeting our agreements,” Tom explained.

      “That helps. What kinds of complaints were you hearing from Jared’s team?” Paul asked.

      “At first I was hearing general comments such as ‘he doesn’t listen to us.’ I take that with a grain of salt because to be honest, we have implemented a lot of changes in the last year, and I hear that complaint a lot. Plus people just don’t like change, so they say that we’re not listening just because they don’t like what we are saying or we made a decision they don’t like. About a year ago, we reduced our number of suppliers. We also centralized our supplier review teams into four locations in the U.S.: north, east, west, and south, and reduced staff by about 20%. While I tried to hold a lot of town hall meetings to communicate the centralization and the progress of our initiatives, I know that it wasn’t a popular change with employees. We worked through it and tried to be patient, and I think that generally speaking morale is on the upswing,” Tom said.

      “But back to Jared’s team,” Paul prodded, returning Tom to the reason for the meeting.

      “Yes, right. At first it was just one