CONCEPT OF
ORGANISATION DEVLOPMENT
“OD is a response to change, a complex
educational strategy intended to change the beliefs, attitudes, values and
structure of organizations so that they can better adapt to new technologies,
markets, and challenges and the dizzying rate of change itself.”
“Organization development is a
planned process of change in an organization culture through the utilization of
behavioral science technology, research and theory,.”
Organization development is a long
term effort to improve an organization’s problem – solving and renewal
processes, particularly through a more effective and collaborative management
of organization culture – with special emphasis on the culture of formal work
teams – with the assistance of a change agent or catalyst and the use of the
theory and technology of applied behavior science including action research.
FEATURES OF
ORGANISATION DEVELOPMENT
1.
Planned change: OD is a
strategy of planned change for organizational improvement. This ‘Planned’
emphasis separates OD efforts from other kinds of more haphazard changes that
are frequently undertaken by organizations.
2.
Comprehensive change: OD efforts
focus on comprehensive change in the organization rather than focusing
attention on individuals, so that change is easily absorbed. The concept of
comprehensive change is based on the systems concept open, dynamic and adaptive
system. OD efforts take an organization as an interrelated whole and no part of
it can be changed meaningfully without making corresponding changes in other parts.
3.
Long range change: OD efforts
are not meant for solving short – term, temporary or isolated problems. Rather,
OD focuses on the elevation of an organization to a higher level of functioning
by improving the performance and satisfaction of organizational members on long
term basis. These long – term efforts are time consuming. Therefore, OD experts
emphasize that the process takes months or in many cases, years to implement.
Although there may be pressure for quick results the OD process is not intended
to be stop – gap measure.
4.
Dynamic Process: OD is a
dynamic process and includes the efforts to guide and direct changes as well as
to cope with or adapt changes imposed. It recognizes that organizational goals
change, so the methods of attaining these goals should also change. Thus, OD
efforts are not one – shot actions, rather they are ongoing, interactive and
cyclic process.
5.
Participation of change agent: Most OD emphasis the need for an outside, third party change
agent, or catalyst. They discourage ‘do it yourself’ approach. There is a close
working relationship between the change agent
and the target organizational members to be changed. The relationship
involves mutual trust, joint goals and means and mutual influence. The change
agent is a humanist seeking to get a humanistic philosophy in the organization.
He shares a social philosophy about human values.
6.
Emphasis on intervention and action research: OD approach results in an active intervention in the ongoing
activities of the organization. Action research is the basis for such
intervention. A change agent in OD process does not just introspect the people
and introduce changes, rather, he conducts surveys, collects relevant data
evaluates these data, and then takes actions for intervention. He designs
intervention strategies based on these data.
7.
Normative educational process: OD is based on the principle that norms form the basis for
behavior and change is a re-educative process of replacing old norms by the new
ones. This is done to arrive at certain desirable outcomes that may be in the
form of increased effectiveness, problem – solving and adaptability for the
organization as a whole. At the individual level, OD attempts to provide
opportunities to be ‘human’ and to increase awareness, participation and
integrate individual and organizational goals.
DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MANAGEMENT DEVELOPMENT AND ORGANIZATION
DEVELOPMENT
|
Factors
|
Management
development
|
Organization
Development
|
|
Objective
|
Increasing manager’s
contribution to goal accomplishment.
|
changing the nature of the
organization
|
|
Focus
|
Train and equip employees and Managers
to perform better in existing organization
|
focus on design, not on the managers; focus on achieving
improvements in design
|
|
Approach Time
|
Educative and training
Short-range
|
Problem-solving approach.
Long-range strategy for organizational innovation and renewal
|
|
Specialist
|
No special recruitment
|
Trained specialists required
|
ROLE OF ORGANISATION DEVELOPMENT:
Organization development, as a long – term strategy for
organizational change, plays key role in organizational improvement. The basic problem
in a change effort which is not comprehensive is that it does not work properly
unless there is a proper change in the internal environment of the organization
in which people work. Since OD attempts to being comprehensive change in the
organization, it is quite suitable for improving organizational performance
on long – term basis. Thus OD can be
utilized for the following results in the organization:
1.
To
place emphasis on humanistic values and goals consistent with these values;
2.
To
treat each human being a s a complex persons with a complex set of needs
important in his work and his life.
3.
To
increase the level of trust and mutual emotional support among all
organizational members.
4.
To
increase the level of enthusiasm and personal satisfaction at all levels of the
organization.
5.
To
increase the level of self and group responsibility in planning and its
implementation.
6.
To
increase the openness of communications in all directions – vertically,
horizontally and laterally.
7.
To
create an environment in which authority in which authority of assigned role is
augmented by authority based on knowledge and skills.
PROBLEMS IN ORGANISATION DEVELOPMENT
Organization development, however has invited sharp criticism as a
strategy to increase organizational viability and effectiveness because many OD
programmes have failed. Much of the enthusiasm created at the beginning of OD
programmes vanished over the period of time. In early 60’s, OD became quite
successful with many professional consultants offering high services and
programmes to various organizations. By 70’s however, substantial
disenchantment with OD became evident because of many controversial OD
techniques like sensitivity training, confrontation techniques etc. research
studies have also failed to conclude significant contributions of OD in all
organizations, particularly in bottom – line ones. Therefore, OD can not be
taken as panacea for curing all organizational problems. In general, OD is
criticized on the following lines:
1.
There
is discrepancy between ideal and real situations. OD ties to achieve ideal
without taking into account real.
2.
OF
makes people unit for the real organizational world because no organizations
can fully adopt open system concept.
3.
Resistance
to change is a natural phenomenon and OD puts undue pressure to change. Hence,
it fails even as a long term strategy.
4.
OD
fails to motivate people with low level of achievement needs. If an
organization is laden with these people, it is useless to try OD.
5.
OD
programmes are often quite costly and only large organizations can afford this
luxury without any guarantee of positive outcome.
It can be seen that many of these criticisms are based on reality
and experience. People realized its dysfunctional aspects only when many OD
efforts failed. However it may be emphasized that OD programmes are likely to
fail when these are not undertaken properly. In fact, there have been cases of
wrong implementation of OD programmes and hence failure. For example, Evans has
identified three factors which have been possible for the failure of OD
programmes:
1.
Failure
of the management consultant group to correctly tailor the programme to actual
needs of the organization.
2.
Failure
to correctly model appropriate personnel behavior in the programme.
3.
Failure
to increase employee motivation through participation and development of
personal growth and self – esteem.
Thus it can be visualized that OD itself may not be dysfunctional
but application may be. Therefore in order to make best use of OD efforts, some
specific efforts are required. Some of these efforts are as follows:
1.
There
should be genuine support of OD programme from top management.
2.
Organization
must formulate the objectives of OD programme very clearly and specifically.
3.
Enough
time should be allowed so that the effects of OD programme are realized.
4.
There
should be proper use of OD interventions. These should be based on the specific
needs of the organization.
5. Only fully competent OD consultant should be pressed for the
service and he should develop understanding with internal change agents.
