Organization development (OD) is a deliberately planned effort to increase an organization's relevance and viability. Vasudevan has referred to OD as, future readiness to meet change, thus a systemic learning and development strategy intended to change the basics of beliefs, attitudes and relevance of values, and structure of the current organization to better absorb disruptive technologies, shrinking or exploding market opportunities and ensuing challenges and chaos.
OD is the framework for a change process designed to lead to desirable positive impact to all stakeholders and the environment.
OD can design interventions with application of several multidisciplinary methods and research besides traditional OD approaches.
History
Kurt Lewin (1898–1947) is widely recognized as the founding father of OD, although he died before the concept became current 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, Lewin experimented with a collaborative change process (involving himself as 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 then participated in the beginnings of laboratory training, or T-groups, and, after his death in 1947, his close associates helped to develop survey-research methods at the University of Michigan.
Douglas McGregor and Richard Beckhard while "consulting together at General Mills in the 1950s, the two coined the term organizational development (OD) to describe an innovative bottoms-up change effort that fit no traditional consulting categories" (Weisbord, 1987, p. 112).
Core Values
Underlying Organizational Development are humanistic values. Margulies and Raia (1972) articulated the humanistic values of OD as follows:
Providing opportunities for people to function as human beings rather than as resources in the productive process.
Providing opportunities for each organization member, as well as for the organization itself, to develop to his full potential.
Seeking to increase the effectiveness of the organization in terms of all of its goals.
Attempting to create an environment in which it is possible to find exciting and challenging work.
Providing opportunities for people in organizations to influence the way in which they relate to work, the organization, and the environment.
Treating each human being as a person with a complex set of needs, all of which are important in his work and in his life.[5]
Change agent
A change agent in the sense used here is not a technical expert skilled in such functional areas as accounting, production, or finance. The change agent is a behavioral scientist who knows how to get people in an organization involved in solving their own problems. A change agent's main strength is a comprehensive knowledge of human behavior, supported by a number of intervention techniques (to be discussed later). The change agent can be either external or internal to the organization. An internal change agent is usually a staff person who has expertise in the behavioral sciences and in the intervention technology of OD. Beckhard reports several cases in which line people have been trained in OD and have returned to their organizations to engage in successful change assignments.[6] In the natural evolution of change mechanisms in organizations, this would seem to approach the ideal arrangement. Qualified change agents can be found on some university faculties, or they may be private consultants associated with such organizations as the National Training Laboratories Institute for Applied Behavioral Science (Washington, D.C.) University Associates (San Diego, California), the Human Systems Intervention graduate program in the Department of Applied Human Sciences (Concordia University, Montreal, Canada), Navitus (Pvt) Ltd (Pakistan), and similar organizations.
(Wikipedia 02.2013)
BERNE'S ORGANISATIONAL THEORY AND THE EMERGING CHANGE ARE VERY POWERFUL DEVELOPMENT TOOL FOR ORGANISATIONS PARTICULARLY BECAUSE THEY PROVIDE CONCRETE INTERVENTION TOOLS FOR THE CHANGE AGENT: DIAGNOSIS AND CONTRATS
