Organization Development Interventions

Executing Effective Organizational Change

William J. Rothwell, Sohel M. Imroz, Behnam Bakhshandeh, William J. Rothwell, Sohel M. Imroz, Behnam Bakhshandeh

• Publisher: Productivity Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000418361
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Development
• Index: Business

To effectively adapt and thrive in today's business world, organizations need to implement effective organizational development (OD) interventions to improve performance and effectiveness at the individual, group, and organizational levels. OD interventions involve people, trust, support, shared power, conflict resolution, and stakeholders' participation, just to name a few. OD interventions usually have broader scope and can affect the whole organization. OD practitioners or change agents must have a solid understanding of different OD interventions to select the most appropriate one to fulfill the client's needs. There is limited precise information or research about how to design OD interventions or how they can be expected to interact with organizational conditions to achieve specific results.

This book offers OD practitioners and change agents a step-by-step approach to implementing OD interventions and includes example cases, practical tools, and guidelines for different OD interventions. It is noteworthy that roughly 65% of organizational change projects fail. One reason for the failure is that the changes are not effectively implemented, and this book focuses on how to successfully implement organizational changes.

Designed for use by OD practitioners, management, and human resources professionals, this book provides readers with OD basic principles, practices, and skills by featuring illustrative case studies and useful tools. This book shows how OD professionals can actually get work done and what the step-by-step OD effort should be. This book looks at how to choose and implement a range of interventions at different levels. Unlike other books currently available on the market, this book goes beyond individual, group, and organizational levels of OD interventions, and addresses broader OD intervention efforts at industry and community levels, too. Essentially, this book provides a practical guide for OD interventions. Each chapter provides practical information about general OD interventions, supplies best practice examples and case studies, summarizes the results of best practices, provides at least one case scenario, and offers at least one relevant tool for practitioners.

Foundations

I

Chapter 1

What Is an OD Intervention?

William J. Rothwell

Contents

Vignettes

Vignette One

Vignette Two

Vignette Three

Vignette Four

Summary

What Is an OD Intervention?

OD Interventions Are Implemented in Ways Consistent with OD Values and Assumptions

OD Interventions Differ by Issues, Types, and Number of People Affected

Interventions Organized by Issues

The Size Involved in the Change

Types of Solutions

Roles of Team Leaders, OD Practitioners and Team Members in OD Interventions

What the Team Leader Does in OD Interventions

What OD Practitioners Do in OD Interventions

What the Team Members Should Do in OD Interventions

What Do OD Practitioners Devote Most of Their Time to Doing During Implementation?

Discussion Questions

References

Read the following vignettes. Take out a pen and a piece of paper, and indicate what you would do if faced with each one:

Vignettes

Vignette One

A large company is implementing a customer service improvement effort. The company hired an external consultant to survey a random sample of customers on Friday of each week. The surveys center around how customer service teams deal with those customers calling in for help. On Monday mornings each customer service team receives the results of the survey from Friday, and they use those results as a focal point to plan for improvement over the next week. The customer service manager is not, however, involved in any team meetings or survey efforts. A practitioner helps each team draw conclusions from the survey results and establish action plans for improvement.

Vignette Two

An organization development (OD) practitioner is offering help to a television station that is moving to self-directed work teams. The consultant meets each week with the television team that manages a television show. There are 10 teams. After each team meeting, the consultant has an “open door session” in which individual team members may meet with the consultant to discuss issues that influence them individually. When the consultant is not onsite, she stays in touch with the team members by videoconference, text messages, and phone calls.

Vignette Three

The manager of an HR department decides to act as her own OD practitioner. Each week she meets with her team online (and by videoconference) to discuss ways of helping the team work together more effectively. She began the effort by interviewing each team member about ways the team could improve its group dynamics and then fed back the results of the interviews to the team. The team members decided on what issues to improve and brainstormed on ways to improve in such areas as group decision making, group problem solving, and even group participation.

Vignette Four

The CEO of a large company recently decided to restructure his organization. He believes that a new structure will be more effective in helping the people of the organization design their efforts to achieve the organization’s strategic objectives. On a Friday afternoon, the CEO hosted a broadcast on the company’s intranet to reveal the new organization chart and to answer questions about it. He was overwhelmed with questions—some 4,300 in a few minutes. The CEO promised answers to the questions, but they were never offered. The CEO did not offer any other broadcasts or send out other messages.

Summary

The vignettes above provide short descriptions of what OD interventions might look like. Some of the vignettes describe good approaches; some, of course, do not represent good approaches but show areas in which OD practitioners can offer meaningful help.

What Is an OD Intervention?

Defined in simple terms, an OD intervention is a planned, participative change effort. It is, when regarded in context, the implementation phase of the Action Research Model (see Figure 1.1) or the implementation phase of the Appreciative Inquiry Model (see Figure 1.2). Carried out to solve organizational problems or to leverage organizational strengths, OD interventions are change efforts. Much has been written about them (see Bunker & Alban 1996 and 2006; Franz 2012; Walton 1969). Not all change efforts are OD interventions because many change efforts are neither planned nor participative. Many change efforts in psychology may be regarded as related to OD interventions, since OD and psychology share many values (see, for instance, Michie et al. 2014).

Figure 1.1 Kurt Lewin's Action Research Model (ARM) and Placement of Intervention in Context.

Figure 1.2 The Appreciative Inquiry Model (AIM) and Placement of Intervention in Context.

OD interventions are not the same as ad hoc change efforts. Unplanned change efforts are managed ad hoc, and managers tend to “make up the change plan as they go along.” They make decisions as problems arise. Often, ad hoc change efforts consist of managers taking actions and then solving the problems the managers created from their own ill-planned efforts. As a simple example, managers change the working hours of a company. They then discover that the new working hours conflict with the times that employees must pick up their children from school. As a result of the problem created by their efforts, they must change the working hours again. Workers then grow confused about the company’s working hours, and some people are subjected to corrective action because they were never told about (or got the message about) the new working hours!

While OD interventions are not the same as ad hoc approaches to change implementation, they are also different from a project management-driven approach to organizational change. While change management is popular, it can mean project-driven approaches to change. When using that approach, managers will devise a detailed model to guide any change effort. Like all project plans, the change effort will have step-by-step implementation plans, time-based milestones and deadlines, staffing plans and responsibility charts, and budgets. Managers devise the plans and then implement them rigorously. If unexpected problems arise during implementation—which is often the case in modern business—then managers decide whether to change the project plan or else force workers to abide by the original plan. In many cases the workers are forced to abide by the original project plan even when external conditions render achievement of project targets difficult or even impossible.

Change management generally places accomplishment of project tasks above stakeholder participation and shared decision making. OD, in contrast, generally places stakeholder participation and involvement above project accomplishment because of trust that keeping worker ownership in the change will ultimately lead to success—and perhaps to innovation to address dynamic business and competitive conditions.

OD Interventions Are Implemented in Ways Consistent with OD Values and Assumptions

OD interventions bring with them many values and assumptions, and change efforts using OD are implemented in distinctive ways that emphasize those values and assumptions. Values are expressions of what is important and not so important to the organization. Assumptions are beliefs that underlie actions. OD values include:

• Belief in human dignity
• Respect for individuals
• Belief in the importance of participation
• Belief that people should be mindful of how their actions can be perceived

Many other such values exist. In the book Organizational development: Values, process and technology, Margulies and Raia (1975) listed OD values that remain relevant to this day. To summarize, Margulies and Raia wrote that OD:

• Permits people to act as humans rather than play a part as mere economic resources
• Allows people to realize their capabilities
• Emphasizes effectiveness (doing the right things) over efficiency (doing things right)
• Builds a highly engaging and highly involving corporate culture
• Gives workers voice in decisions affecting them
• Pays attention to worker individuality rather than treating people using “one-size-fits-all” approaches

OD practitioners assume that:

• The best experts to solve problems in an organization are not external experts but rather the people within the organization.
• The biggest problem...