Organization Development (OD)

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Organization Development (OD) is a paradigm combining humanistic philosophy and theories about organizational change. The objective of OD is to design organizations that foster individual growth as well as economic prosperity. OD assumes that organizations must be guided to the desired state by an active intervention supported by management. The managerial effort must therefore be effective in overcoming the inherent opposition to change within organizations. A successful OD project will create a learning organization that is dynamic instead of rigid. Organization Development is defined by Cummings and Worley (1993, p. 691) as: "A system wide effort applying behavioral science knowledge to the planned creation and reinforcement of organizational strategies, structures, and processes for improving an organization's effectiveness." Another definition is that "OD is an effort (1) planned, (2) organization wide, and (3) managed from the top, to (4) increase organization development and health through (5) planned interventions in the organization's processes, using behavioural science knowledge." (Beckhard, 1969, p. 9, quoted from Buchanan & Huczynski, 1997, p. 487).

In essence, OD is a planned process of change (Burke, 1994, p. 12). Planned change requires a systemic, goal-orientated approach applied with diligence over time. It claims reliance on valid knowledge from the behavioural sciences: such as sociology, social psychology, anthropology and management theory. Organizational development also includes changes in decision making process, shape and nature of groups, work procedures, job descriptions and roles. The imperative is to change, in order to improve quality and effectiveness. This process typically involves a dynamic complex interaction between those who are wedded to the present state, despite frustrations, and those who share a vision of a future better state.

Every organization will always face issues and problems. The issues might appear from the employees’ side, the work design/system, or from the senior managers. For that reason, a company should consider a person who could acts as a change agent. According to Waddell, Cummings, and Worley (2004), an organization development practitioner could be considered as the change agent. Organization development practitioner refers to a person, who has the ability to consult, create organization development intervention to an organization or an organization’s client in order to obtain organizational effectiveness and improvements. To become an effective organization development practitioner, he/she has to be able to design effective interventions that could address the organization issues. To design effective intervention, organization development practitioner has to be able to give cautious attention to the needs and dynamics of the change situation and to expertise a change program that will be consistent with the criteria of the effective intervention. The criteria of effective interventions are where the interventions fit the needs of organization, the interventions based on casual knowledge of intended outcomes and the interventions convey the ability to manage change to organization members. Moreover, to be a good and effective organization development practitioner, there are four steps of organizational planned change that the organization development practitioner should comprehensive. The four steps are entering and contracting, diagnosing, planning and implementing change, and evaluating and institutionalizing change. This essay will discusses the last step, which is the evaluating and institutionalizing organization change (interventions).

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The term intervention refers to “a set of sequence planned action or events that are intended to help an organization increase its effectiveness” (Waddell, et al., 2004, p.). Interventions can focus on an individual (coaching), groups (teambuilding, survey feedback, strategic planning), departments or subsystems (data collection, diagnosis and problem solving workshops), or the total organization (Hanson, 1995).Hanson goes on to state that an Organization Development intervention does not mean that an Organization development program is in progress. Evaluation of organization development intervention is “concerned with providing feedback to practitioners and organization members about the progress and impact of interventions” ...

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