CHAPTER: 18

Md. Musharrof Hossain

Head- HRM, icddr,b
President - BSHRM
Contextual trends and their effect on OD’s
Future
ECONOMY
 More concerned with cultural diversity
 More concentrated wealth
 More concerned ecologically

WORKFORCE
 Increasing diverse
 Increasingly educated
 Increasingly contingent
Contextual trends and their effect on
OD’s Future
TECHNOLOGY
 More E-commerce
 Faster organizational process
 More productivity

ORGANIZATIONS
 More networked
 More Knowledge, learning, and innovation based
Contextual trends and their effect on OD’s
Future
ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOMENT will be:

 More embedded in the organization's operations

 More technologically enabled
 Shorter OD cycle times
 More interdisciplinary
 More diverse in client
 More cross –cultural
 More concerned with organization
 Traditional
 Traditionalist argue that OD should be driven by long –
established values of human potential, equality, trust,
and collaboration. It is proposed that OD should do what
is right by assuring that organizations promote positive
social change and corporate citizenship.
 Pragmatic
 Related to increasing demands for professionalization
of the field and an emphasis on relevance.
Championed by change management practices at large
consulting firms and some OD professional
associations, pragmatists argue that OD practitioners
should be certified like most other professionals. OD
should require certification of members, create a
common body of knowledge, define minimum levels o
f competencies, and institute other regulatory
infrastructure.
 Scholarly
 Focuses on understanding, predicting an controlling
change. Unlike traditionalist and pragmatist, scholars
are concerned with creating valid knowledge, and with
generalizing conclusions about how change occurs,
how it is triggered, under what conditions it works well
and so on
Scholars proposed a research agenda
w/c includes
 How multiple context and levels of analysis affect
organizational change
 The inclusion of time, history, process and action in
theories of change
 The link between change processes and
organization performance
 The comparative analysis of international and cross-
cultural OD interventions
 The study of receptivity, customization, sequencing, pace,
and episodic versus continuous change processes
 The partnership between scholars and practitioners is
studying organizational change
 Implication of OD’s Future
OD will have more conflicts in the Short term
 Traditionalist fear that OD is becoming too corporate
and may unwittingly get together with powerful
stakeholders to promote goals inconsistent with OD’s
social responsibility and humanistic values
 Pragmatist on the other hand worry that
relying too heavily on traditional values will reinforce
OD’s touchy feely orientation.
 Implication of OD’s Future
 OD will have more conflicts in the Short term

 The debate over values demonstrates how difficult it

will be to gain agreement about standards,
competencies, enforcement mechanisms, and
oversight.
Implication of OD’s Future
OD will become more integrated in the long term
 There is a considerable common ground among the
diverse trends within the OD, and the emergence f a
more integrated view of the field seems likely in the
long term
The Economy
Increasing concern over social and ecological consequences

 Cultural diversity – Governments face the difficult choice

of preserving their culture ant the risk of being left out of the
global economy.

 Income distribution – globalization of the economy is closely

related to an increasing concentration of wealth in relatively
few individuals, corporation and nations.

 Ecological sustainability – there are increasingly clear

warnings that the ecosystem no longer can be treated as a factor
of production and that success cannot be defined as the
accumulation of wealth and material goods at the expense
of the environment
 The Workforce
The workforce is becoming more:
 Diverse – organizations, whether they operate primarily in
their home country or abroad, will need to develop policies
and operating styles that embrace the changing cultural,
ethnic, gender and age diversity of the workforce.

 Educated – the workforce is becoming more educated. A

more educated workforce demands higher wages, more
involvement in decision making and continued investment
of knowledge and skills.
 The Workforce--------
The workforce is becoming more:
 Contingent – the continued high rate of downsizings, re-
engineering efforts, and mergers and acquisitions is
forcing the workforce to become more contingent and
less loyal.
Technology
 Internet – the backbone of global economy.
 E-commerce – an economy that knows
no boundaries. It involves buying and selling
products and services over the internet. Two types
of E-commerce relevant to OD’s Future
 Business-to-consumer – garners much attention and
awareness because it is how the public participates in E-
commerce.
 Business-to-business – more complex
Organization
 Organization - involves increasingly networked
and knowledge based nature of organizations. The
interventions help organizations become more
streamlined and flexible, more capable of improving
themselves continuously in response to economic
and other trends and more effective. Networks – are
highly adaptable and can disband and reform along
different task or market lines as the circumstances
demand.
 OD will be more embedded in
the organization’s Operations
 this suggest that OD practices will become more
embedded in the organization’s normal operating
routines. OD skills, knowledge, and competencies can
and should become the daily work of managers and
employees.
 OD process will be more
technologically Enabled
 Information technology is pervasive and will have a
significant affect on OD practice. First, it will enable
OD to be synchronous and asynchronous (anytime,
anywhere) as well as virtual and less face to face.
Second, information technology will provide much
more data about the organization to a greater number
of participants in a shorter period of time.
OD Cycle Times will be Shorter
 new information technologies will expedite certain
steps in the change process. Incoming years, new
technologies such as groupware and video
conferencing, will increasingly be used to bring more
people together faster than ever before. There is areal
potential to reduce dramatically the time required to
perform many OD practices.
OD will be more Interdisciplinary
 OD will continue to become more interdisciplinary
and rely on different perspectives and approaches to
develop and change organizations. It will balance
human fulfillment and economic performance,
provide a fuller recognition of the systemic and
dynamic nature of organizations and develop
improved techniques for managing large scale, and
change w/n and across natural cultures.
OD will be Applied to More Diverse
Organizations
 In the future planned change will be applied to amore
diverse client base. Types of organizations that are
target of planned change
 Small entrepreneurial start-ups – important
underserved market for OD.
 Governments – increasingly applying OD
interventions such as strategic planning, employee
involvement, and performance management.
 Global Social Change
Organizations--------
 the increasing concentration of wealth and
globalization of the economy will create a plethora
of opportunities for OD to assists developing
countries, disadvantage citizens and ecology.
OD will become More Cross-Cultural
 As organizations and the economy become more
global, the recent growth of OD practice in
international and cross-cultural situations will
continue. The current trends of OD clearly point to the
need for OD applications that work across cultures.
 OD will Focus more on Ecological
Sustainability
 Limits to the world’s ecosystem, including its capacity
to absorb population growth, function with a depleted
ozone layer, and operate with polluted waters, provide
serious challenges to the traditional business model.