What is Organizational Development?
which is at the root of real return on
Organisational development (OD) is
concerned with facilitating change in
organisations through a holistic and
humanistic approach that puts people at the
heart of the process.
Here at Roffey Park, we define Organisational
Development as the work of facilitating
organisational success, by aligning structural,
cultural and strategic realities of work to
respond to the needs of an ever-evolving
business climate.
At the heart of good organizational
development is the deep connection between
the best business processes and structures on
the one hand, and the people working within
the organization on the other. In short, it is to
create great organisations!
There are significant differences between
organisational development and ‘culture
change’, ‘change management’ and ‘business
transformation’. Find out more about the
definition of OD here.
What is Organisational Development trying to
fix?
To achieve high performance and competitive
advantage, organisations are often in the
midst of significant learning and change.
In traditional organisation and leadership
theory, the inspirational, top-down vision for
the organisation is supposedly created by a
few and thrust upon the many.
Such change initiatives may result in a
successful change of procedures and
structures (the easier bit), but rarely trigger
sustainable change in working methods,
culture and organisational effectiveness
investment, profitability and long-term
transformation. Organisational Development
(OD) is an area of expertise which addresses
this challenge with decades of internationally
tried and tested research and practice,
spanning thousands of professionals.
Key Characteristics of Organisational
Development
Organization Development (OD) is the work
of facilitating organisational success, by
aligning structural, cultural and strategic
realities of work to respond to the needs of an
ever-evolving business climate.
Characteristics of OD include:
• Changes to the structure, culture,
strategy and processes of an individual
job through to an entire organisation.
• The application of behavioural science
knowledge and practice to facilitate
transformation within an organisation.
• The improvement of organisational
effectiveness by involving members of
the organisation in understanding the
challenge whilst enabling in them new
skills, knowledge and ways of
thinking.
• The promotion of high productivity,
performance, quality products,
financial performance and continuous
improvement.
• The facilitation of change in a flexible,
adaptive and often participative way.
• Sustainability, so consistent change in
the right direction continues beyond
the life of the initial change initiative.
OD also operates from a particular set of
values that shape how the work is done. Key
to this is the valuing of human potential and
therefore the importance of understanding the
systemic challenges from a range of
stakeholders and to then engage those
stakeholders directly in shaping the change,
partly so that change is well conceived of but Abraham Maslow (1908-1970), a psychology
also so that, through broad ownership, its professor most famous for his ‘hierarchy of
chance of being understood and implemented needs’, and another important figure in the
are maximised. history of Organisational Development,
believed that when an individual’s needs
The History of Organisational Development
were met, it led to ‘self-actualisation’. When
an organisation was open, and the
individual’s contributions were recognised,
this was more likely to occur. Other theorists
advocated participation as a means of
motivating employees and achieving a greater
performance, and leadership styles that were
democratic and involving were shown to lead
to better organisational performance and
employee satisfaction.
The roots of Organisational Development can
be found in the USA, in the work of Kurt
Lewin (1898-1947). Seen as the founding
father of OD, he founded the ‘Research Center
for Group Dynamics’ at MIT, experimented
with collaborative change processes, and
proposed the first concepts of group dynamics
and action research, which underpin OD.
Lewin found that using participative methods
in small groups led to positive changes in In 1969, Warren Bennis introduced the
attitude and greater commitment from the concept of organisational culture, identifying
people in organisations. A parallel interest in that OD is ‘a complex educational strategy
what happens in individuals and groups in intended to change beliefs, attitudes, values,
work also arose in Europe and the UK over a and structures of organizations so that they
similar period, with Roffey Park founded in can better adapt to new technologies, markets,
1946 and The Tavistock Institute in 1947. and challenges, and the dizzying rate of
change itself’.

Edgar Schein at the start of the 1980’s,
developed this idea of ‘organisational
culture’, using metaphors of the cultural
iceberg and lily pad. With the iceberg, Schein
shows how difficult it is to see what underlies
the behaviours of an organisation, as most is
hidden below the surface. With his lily pad
analogy, he proposes that we can easily see
the flowers on the water (the behaviours
explicit in an organisation), however unless
we drop down to the stems (the values
supporting those behaviours) and then the
partly hidden roots (the assumptions behind
these values and behaviours), we cannot truly
understand what drives the organisation’s
actions and thoughts of the people within the
organisation.
Behavioural sciences, including
anthropology, economics, psychology, and
sociology have all had their impact in the
evolution of Organisational Development,
and as a result, in 2002, Toby Egan identified
there had been 27 definitions of OD between
the period 1969 and 2003.
Why is Organisational Development useful?
If you’re involved in any way in helping an
organization to move forwards and evolve,
then it’s imperative to do this with eyes wide
open to the big picture. Organizational
Development not only addresses what may be
more obvious changes that are needed
(structural, business objectives, product
development, strategic direction, stakeholder
requirements, etc), but also the hidden aspects
of organizational culture and details how to
utilize or change these for effective,
sustainable, long-term success which brings
the organization along with you.
The Benefits of Organisational Development
Organisational Development is adaptive,
flexible and evolving. It puts people at the
heart of change, emphasises creativity and
innovation, and positively affects the bottom
line.
• OD creates a continuous cycle of
improvement, from strategy, through
to implementation, evaluation and
further change.
• OD increases communication across all
levels of the organisation, aligning
employees to shared values and
manifesting change from employee
feedback.
• OD increases innovation through
employee development and
engagement and an effective analysis
of the market.
• OD increases profit by improved
productivity and creativity, reducing
costs, minimizing staff turnover and
creating a culture of openness and
adaptive and ongoing change.
Using Action Research in Business
• What is the likelihood of resistance and
inertia? – a tendency to do nothing, a
state of unchanged (business of
understanding change)
• Is your organization ready for a change?
-internal (reorganization-restructuring)
and external (changing market
behaviors, falling revenues, changing
business landscape) business is
dynamic in nature(inevitable)- to
sustain in an environment
• Are the leaders committed to the
change? Rational change (Fear towards
the unknown
• Fear regarding the Personal Failure
• Fear of Being Labelled as Incompetent-
job security.
• Fear of Loss of Control over the
situation- increase workload
• Threat to personal values, principles or
philosophy-adversely affect social
networking of the employee.
• Threat of a possible change in the status-
unnecessary appointing committees
• Who are the other key stakeholders that
need to be involved?
• Who or what could derail the change?
• What processes are you going to use to
work with others in the design and
implementation of change? Employee
Behavior & Attitudes During
Organizational Change
• What are the important systems and
processes involved?
People don’t resist change; they resist being
changed” (Senge, 2000). Groups and people
that make up an organization must be open to
change to retain market leadership within their
industry. To effectively introduce change to a
company, management must consider the
implementation of a dynamic organizational
change model that is conducive to all
levels. The most effective organizational
change model bases decisions on known data
and leverages an objective methodology for
the implementation and assessment of the
workplace for ongoing continuous
improvement.
Action research is an organizational
change behavior model that leverages direct
inputs to derive effective business outcomes
through employee collaboration. Action
research identifies the data anomalies that are
occurring in the workplace and breaks them
down into an actionable plan based on
employee feedback. The employee input
establishes a new business process in the
company and a means to continuously monitor
and provide insight into the output of the
action plan through ongoing improvement
(Shani and Coghlan, 2018).
The action research methodology has
five interwoven steps: diagnosis, analysis,
feedback, action, and evaluation. Each of the
five steps in the process build and complement
one another and serve as a roadmap for the
change agent. The first step in the process is the
information gathering and investigative
phase.
Step 1 - Diagnosis
During the initial step a detailed analysis
of the target environment, the change agent
will gather detailed information about the
individual, groups, and
organization. Reviewing existing policies and
procedures, interviewing employees and
management, as well as assessing the existing
organizational business processes are some
examples of the material the change agent will
target. Like a police officer performing a police
investigation at a crime scene, the change agent
will carefully analyze and identify each of the
elements at the individual, group, and
organizational level that are contributing to the
business problem in an attempt to discover the
relevant evidence (Pascaru, 2020).
At the individual level, the change agent
will evaluate the overall diversity and
demographics of the employee base and ask
those questions to actively learn about what
shapes their personal values, overall attitude,
and personality makeup. The change agent
will ascertain factors that are motivating and
de-motivating to the workforce and determine
where any gaps may exist between
organizational and employee expectations.
At the group and organizational level,
the change agent will focus on existing formal
and informal constructs. Roles,
responsibilities, inter-departmental
relationships, and organizationally defined
relationships such as cross functional role-
mapping and dependencies are also
considered. The overall culture and the team’s
ability to achieve the company’s desired
outcomes will also help diagnose and establish
an objective analysis for change in the
organization.
Step 2 - Analysis
Analysis of the data and preliminary
findings is a critical second step. Objectifying
and capturing relevant patterns that describe
the situation is an integral activity. For
example, is there a symptomatic pattern of
behavior that leads the team to the same
undesirable result on a frequent basis? The
intent for the change agent is to capture the
problem areas and primary concerns that
reflect the current mode of business and begin
to develop and formulate potential action
plans to implement based on the use of
statistical action research (Durcikova et al.,
2018).
The change agent will quantify and
evaluate the existing data and shape the results
into potential options to deliver the intended
results. Analyzing the data for patterns and
identifying the distress in the processes that are
causing the discord help to provide insight into
how alternative approaches may alleviate the
source of the problem and help deliver the
intended result. The key is objectifying the
potential resolution to the extent possible, but
not at the expense of the role the individual
plays in shaping reality.
Although performing statistical analysis
in action research at times is not always precise
nor provides exact answers the approach is still
a valuable tool to the change agent, and there
are measures that can be taken to help facilitate
and validate the overall outcome of the result
(Kock et al., 2017). The intent is to attempt to
seek and net out the root causes to identify
plausible approaches to eliminate or mitigate
the negative effects that are currently
impinging on the desired result. Analysis
enables the change agent to create the
necessary framework to collaborate with the
employees and obtain their input for action.
Step 3 - Feedback
Feedback is the process of sharing the
information found in the diagnosis and
analysis stages with the internal stakeholders
and the change agent shaping a go-forward
strategy to streamline the organization
(Collatto et al., 2018). Action plans are co-
developed and prototyped to bring about the
necessary change to meet the intended
outcomes within the organization. The change
agent’s inputs are recommendations based on
the findings and the employees help to shape
what is plausible and can be done in the area
of operations.
 The change agent must be careful not
accept all of the recommendations from the
organization to avoid creating the same
problem but should augment the necessary
feedback to prototype and validate the new
processes in the workplace. The change agent
needs to include in the action plan information
that will counteract fear stemming from
employee’s habits, organizational group
inertia, threats to established relationships,
etc. The goal of the draft action plan is to lay
out an approach and the intended benefits for
the organization, what the employees will
receive by following the process, and an
implementation methodology that overcomes
employee resistance.
The goal of overcoming resistance is
allowing the stakeholders to recognize change
is warranted based on the market forces and is
not a direct attack on their personal and/or
organizational ways of doing things and
should be gathered in a positive feedback-
seeking climate (Auh et al., 2019). Open,
candid conversation and directly engaging the
employees helps to minimize resistance. Also,
making the employees and team know they are
contributing to the final group goal without
manipulation and coercion makes them part of
the solution and not the problem. Throughout
the process, the change agent will show
empathy to the individuals and share
examples of success, along with transparent
communication in establishing an action plan
in the organization.
Step 4 - Action
Action is implementing the proposed
plan to determine if the approach corrects the
identified problems. Action plans are done in
two stages. The initial stage is done by
conducting pilots that are designed to affirm
the proposed approach in the final
rollout. During the pilot stage, the team will
make the necessary adjustments prior to
deploying solutions out to the whole
enterprise. An iterative approach allows the
change agent to observe, consolidate, and
validate the most desired outcome for the
deployment as a whole (Lakiza and
Deschamps, 2019).
Upon remediation, the change agent will
coordinate with all of the relevant stakeholders
on the final approach and method for the
deployment and what can be expected in the
final deployment stage. A single point of
escalation is normally set up for the
stakeholders to reach out during deployment
to address unexpected issues during the
implementation of the change. Also, as part of
the stage, the change agent will provide ample
communication to the stakeholders to maintain
a calm transition to the new approach based on
results to avoid direct backlash or resistance to
change.
Step 5 - Evaluation
Successful implementation is critical,
and the change agent must administer a means
to measure the success of the
change. Normally the measures are done at the
individual, group, and organizational
level. Initial results serve as a benchmark, but
the change agent must consider factors such as
acclimatization to the new processes, group
cohesiveness, and organizational productivity
may initially impact the change brought into
the approach and initially skew the
results. Once stabilized, the change agent has
the ability to understand the true impact and if
necessary, make the iterative modifications to
the approach to drive the desired outcome
(Lakiza and Deschamps, 2019).
Also, the change agent should consider
the operational implementation and usage of
ongoing continuous improvement into the
process to help mitigate change that may arise
in the future and identify improvement
opportunities continuously (Paipa-Galeano et
al., 2020). Ongoing improvements help to
determine adjustments as an integral part of
the execution and provide insight to the
employees as part of the day-to-day
routine. Also, workplace stress and apathy are
removed, and meaningful group cohesion
occurs which drives the organization into a
more outcome-results based environment.
In Conclusion...
To be successful, informed companies
utilize objective data to roll out organizational
change management. Action research is an
effective organizational change behavior
model that entails five interlaced
steps. Coupled with continuous improvement,
action research enables evaluation of the
organization to rectify and course-correct the
operations on an ongoing basis.
Action research leverages a scientific-
based framework to identify the inputs to the
problem and establishes processes based on
the feedback of the employees, groups, and
organization to yield and maintain the most
desirable outcomes on behalf of the
company. The problem-focused design uses
relevant data in the environment and input
from employees to understand and mitigate
the problem. The approach encourages
employee engagement in establishing the
necessary processes and desired outcomes
which reduces the resistance to change by the
employee. Action research is an outcome-
results based model in the workplace that
enables employee empowerment, group
cohesion, and a platform to consistently
provide improvement to the organization.
ROOTS AND HISTORY OF OD
From the beginning of time, it is
probable that humanity has tried consistently,
though imperfectly and with notable
exceptions, to improve the lot of life. There are
many examples from religious literature of the
use of consultants in making decisions. One
common to many religious traditions is the
consultation of Moses with his father-in-law,
Jethro, to improve the organization of the large
numbers Of Israelites escaping from Egypt.
Mohammed, also, had his consultants, and one
could argue that the 12 disciples served as
consultants to Jesus. So, as we look at the roots
that led to the formation of OD, we have a
limitless number of options from which to
draw. Even when exploring the history of OD,
one has difficulty, as with any history, in
identifying exactly how the field emerged and
developed. In a recent Web chat about the
history and origins of the OD field with
practitioners and theoreticians who had been
around and involved when OD emerged,
everyone had a different memory, including
those who were in the same room at the same
time! So, it is difficult to argue that there is a
single source of the field of OD. What is
interesting to note is that almost everyone
remembers OD as emerging—that no one set
out to create a new field, but the important
concepts and tools that were to make up the
field of OD emerged as people were simply
trying to do their jobs better.
Most of the early names associated with
the field of OD were, not surprisingly,
psychologists; as a result, our field has been
heavily influenced by the psychological
theories of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Carl
Rogers, and B. F. Skinner. Those influences are Richard Beckhard (mid-1960s) — Most reports
still present in management and the field of indicate that Beckhard was the first person to
OD, in such theories as small group dynamics, coin the phrase organization development.
reinforcement theories, the Myers-Briggs Type
W. Edwards Deming (1950s in Japan; 1980s in
Indicator (MBTI), open-ended interviewing,
the United States) — Few would claim that
and so on. Margaret Mead, Gert Hofstede,
Deming used the processes or language of OD.
Fons Trompenaur, Edward and Mildred Hall,
Nevertheless, at least in the United States,
Edgar Schein, and others reflected efforts at
Deming, through his initial work in Japan,
describing cultures from an anthropological
popularized the concept of continuous process
perspective. John Keynes, Thomas Malthus,
improvement, with the emphasis on processes
and others have introduced economic theories.
rather than results, arguing that the best
In the area of quality management and
processes lead to the best results—a good OD
continuous improvement, names such as
concept!
Joseph Juran, W. Edwards Deming, and Kaoru
Ishikawa are considered primary contributors. Wilfred Bion (late 1940s) — Bion was a key
In the area of systems theory, certainly leader in London's Tavistock Institute (in the
biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy must be UK), where discoveries were being made
included along with more recent contributors about group processes at about the same time
such as Peter Senge and Margaret Wheatley. as T-groups (training groups) were emerging
We could easily fill pages and pages with in the United States. The two concepts
names of people who have made contributions eventually came together as there were
to the field of OD. What follows, in this section, interactions across the ocean.
are a few names selected out of my biases to
Eric Trist (1950s) — Also working in the UK,
reflect only some of the more significant factors
Trist is credited with the development of the
that have contributed to the field of OD. Some
sociotechnical system (STS) in his work in the
of the ideas that follow are based on Alban and
coal mines of England. STS focuses on the
Scherer (2005).
interface among people, machines, and their
Kurt Lewin (mid-1940s) — It is impossible in environment.
this brief paragraph to convey the significance
of Lewin's contributions. Lewin worked with
organizations to improve their productivity
and through various consultancies created the
concepts of force field analysis, sensitivity
training (which led to team building),
feedback, change theory action research, and
self-managed work teams (more about these as
we move forward in this book).
1. When you try to force someone to do what Schein?
they already want to do: a. artefacts
a. they instinctively resist b. shared responsibility
b. they only become more enthusiastic c. Espoused values
d. product quality goes up d. shared assumptions
e. you get things done faster
8. Who pioneered the work on Tavistock
2. "Do your best" is Method?
a. Vague a. Warren Bennis
b. Highly idiosyncratic b. Bensis likert
c. Extremely motivating C. Lippit
d. Wilfred Bion
3. Before you can communicate your vision
you must: 9. The easiest way to change a culture is
a. Understand why your vision inspires you a. rapidly as possible
b. Understand why you care about your b. by tossing out the old and bringing in the
vision new c. reassigning the executive team
c. Be aware of your own hopes, dreams, and D. Building on or strengthening existing
aspirations cultural elements
d. Be willing to let people see how much the E. By instituting new rules and not
vision matters to you tolerating any mistakes
e. All of the above
10. Time is most usefully viewed as:
4. Which one of these is not a characteristic a. something that doesn't pass in boring
of OD? meetings
a. any change b. a scarce resource
b. planned effectiveness c. a way of identifying lazy employees
c. long term d. money
d. aimed at increasing organization e. a tool for provide you with feedback
effectiveness

5. Who coined the terms espoused values

and values in action?
b. Edgar Schein
a. Eric Beme
c. Chrys Argyris
d. Peter Senge

6 . Which one of these contributions is not

credited to kurt lewin ?
a. Force field analysis
B. transactional analysis
c. unfreeze move freeze model
D. Action research
7. Which one of these does not belong to the
model of culture proposed by Edgar