Chapter 03 The Organization Development Practitioner PDF

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The Organization Development Practitioner...

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3 The Organization Development Practitioner Chapters 1 and 2 provided an overview of the field of organization development and a description of the nature of planned change. This chapter extends that introduction by examining the people who perform OD. A closer look at OD practitioners can provide a more personal perspective on the field and can help us understand how and why OD relies so heavily on personal relationships between practitioners and organization members. Much of the literature about OD practitioners views them as internal or external consultants providing professional services—diagnosing systems, developing interventions, and helping to implement them. More recent perspectives expand the practice scope to include professionals in related disciplines, such as industrial psychology and strategic management, as well as line managers who have learned how to carry out OD to change and develop their organizations. A great deal of opinion and some research studies have focused on the necessary skills and knowledge of an effective OD practitioner. Studies of the profession provide a comprehensive list of

basic skills and knowledge that all effective OD practitioners must possess. Most of the relevant literature focuses on people specializing in OD as a profession and addresses their roles and careers. The OD practitioner’s role can be described in relation to its position: internal to the organization, external to it, or in a team comprising both internal and external consultants. The OD practitioner’s role can also be examined in terms of its marginality in organizations, of the emotional demands made on the practitioner, and of where it fits along a continuum from client-centered to consultant-centered functioning. Finally, organization development is an emerging profession providing alternative opportunities for gaining competence and developing a career. The stressful nature of helping professions, however, suggests that OD practitioners must cope with the possibility of professional burnout. As in other helping professions, such as medicine and law, values and ethics play an important role in guiding OD practice and in minimizing the chances that clients will be neglected or abused.

WHO IS THE ORGANIZATION DEVELOPMENT PRACTITIONER? Throughout this text, the term organization development practitioner refers to at least three sets of people. The most obvious group of OD practitioners are those people specializing in OD as a profession. They may be internal or external consultants who offer professional services to organizations, including their top managers, functional department heads, and staff groups. OD professionals traditionally have shared a common set of humanistic values promoting open communications, employee involvement, and personal growth and development. They tend to have common training, skills, and experience in the social processes of organizations (for example, group dynamics, decision making, and

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communications). In recent years, OD professionals have expanded those traditional values and skill sets to include more concern for organizational effectiveness, competitiveness, and bottom-line results, and greater attention to the technical, structural, and strategic parts of organizations. That expansion, mainly in response to the highly competitive demands facing modern organizations, has resulted in a more diverse set of OD professionals geared to helping organizations cope with those pressures.1 The second set of people to whom the term OD practitioner applies are those specializing in fields related to OD, such as reward systems, organization design, total quality, information technology, and business strategy. These content-oriented fields increasingly are becoming integrated with OD’s process orientation, particularly as OD projects have become more comprehensive, involving multiple features and varying parts of organizations. The integrated strategic change intervention described in Chapter 20, for example, is the result of marrying OD with business strategy.2 A growing number of professionals in these related fields are gaining experience and competence in OD, mainly through working with OD professionals on large-scale projects and through attending OD training sessions. For example, most of the large accounting firms diversified into management consulting and change management.3 In most cases, professionals in these related fields do not subscribe fully to traditional OD values, nor do they have extensive OD training and experience. Rather, they have formal training and experience in their respective specialties, such as industrial engineering, information systems, or health care. They are OD practitioners in the sense that they apply their special competence within an OD-like process, typically by engaging OD professionals and managers to design and implement change programs. They also practice OD when they apply their OD competence to their own specialties, thus spreading an OD perspective into such areas as compensation practices, work design, labor relations, and planning and strategy. The third set of people to whom the term applies are the increasing number of managers and administrators who have gained competence in OD and who apply it to their own work areas. Studies and recent articles argue that OD increasingly is applied by managers rather than by OD professionals.4 Such studies suggest that the faster pace of change affecting organizations today is highlighting the centrality of the manager in managing change. Consequently, OD must become a general management skill. Along those lines, Kanter studied a growing number of firms, such as General Electric, HewlettPackard, and 3M, where managers and employees have become “change masters.”5 They have gained the expertise to introduce change and innovation into the organization. Managers tend to gain competence in OD through interacting with OD professionals in actual change programs. This on-the-job training frequently is supplemented with more formal OD training, such as the various workshops offered by the National Training Laboratories (NTL), USC’s Center for Effective Organizations, the Center for Creative Leadership, the Gestalt Institute, UCLA’s Extension Service, and others. Line managers increasingly are attending such external programs. Moreover, a growing number of organizations, including Capital One, Disney, and General Electric, have instituted inhouse training programs for managers to learn how to develop and change their work units. As managers gain OD competence, they become its most basic practitioners. In practice, the distinctions among the three sets of OD practitioners are blurring. A growing number of managers have transferred, either temporarily or permanently, into the OD profession. For example, companies such as Procter & Gamble have trained and rotated managers into full-time OD roles so that they can gain skills and experience needed for higher-level management positions. Also, it is increasingly common to find managers using their experience in OD to become external consultants. More OD practitioners are gaining professional competence in related specialties, such as business process reengineering, reward systems, and organization design. Conversely, many specialists in those related areas are achieving professional competence in OD. Cross-training and integration are producing a more comprehensive and complex kind

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of OD practitioner—one with a greater diversity of values, skills, and experience than a traditional practitioner.

COMPETENCIES OF AN EFFECTIVE ORGANIZATION DEVELOPMENT PRACTITIONER The literature about OD competencies reveals a mixture of personality traits, experiences, knowledge, and skills presumed to lead to effective practice. For example, research on the characteristics of successful change practitioners yields the following list of attributes and abilities: diagnostic ability, basic knowledge of behavioral science techniques, empathy, knowledge of the theories and methods within the consultant’s own discipline, goal-setting ability, problem-solving ability, ability to perform self-assessment, ability to see things objectively, imagination, flexibility, honesty, consistency, and trust.6 Although these qualities and skills are laudable, there has been relatively little consensus about their importance to effective OD practice. Two projects currently seek to define, categorize, and prioritize the skills and knowledge required of OD practitioners. In the first effort, a broad and growing list of wellknown practitioners and researchers are asked to review and update a list of professional competencies. The most recent list has grown to 187 statements in nine areas of OD practice, including entry, start-up, assessment and feedback, action planning, intervention, evaluation, adoption, separation, and general competencies.7 The statements range from “staying centered in the present, focusing on the ongoing process” and “understanding and explaining how diversity will affect the diagnosis of the culture” to “basing change on business strategy and business needs” and “being comfortable with quantum leaps, radical shifts, and paradigm changes.” Recent items added to the list relate to international OD, large-group interventions, and transorganization skills. To understand the relative importance of this long list, Worley and his colleagues collected data from 364 OD practitioners.8 The average respondent had six–ten years of OD experience, a master’s degree, and came from the United States. The results suggested an underlying structure to the list. Twenty-three competencies were generated that reflected both the skills and knowledge necessary to conduct planned change processes and the individual characteristics necessary to be an effective OD practitioner. Similar to other lists, the competencies included the ability to evaluate change, work with large-scale change efforts, create implementation plans, and manage diversity. One of the more surprising results, however, was the emergence of “self mastery” as the most important competence. The results supported the long-held belief that good OD practitioners know themselves and that such knowledge forms the basis of effective practice. The second project, sponsored by the Organization Development and Change Division of the Academy of Management,9 seeks to develop a list of competencies to guide curriculum development in graduate OD programs. More than 40 OD practitioners and researchers worked to develop the two competency lists shown in Table 3.1. First, foundation competencies are oriented toward descriptions of an existing system. They include knowledge from organization behavior, psychology, group dynamics, management and organization theory, research methods, and business practices. Second, core competencies are aimed at how systems change over time. They include knowledge of organization design, organization research, system dynamics, OD history, and theories and models for change; they also involve the skills needed to manage the consulting process, to analyze and diagnose systems, to design and choose interventions, to facilitate processes, to develop clients’ capability to manage their own change, and to evaluate organization change. The information in Table 3.1 applies primarily to people specializing in OD as a profession. For them, possessing the listed knowledge and skills seems reasonable, especially in light of the growing diversity and complexity of interventions in OD. Gaining

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[Table 3.1] Knowledge and Skill Requirements of OD Practitioners FOUNDATION COMPETENCIES Knowledge

1. Organization behavior A. Organization culture B. Work design C. Interpersonal relations D. Power and politics E. Leadership F. Goal setting G. Conflict H. Ethics 2. Individual psychology A. Learning theory B. Motivation theory C. Perception theory 3. Group dynamics A. Roles B. Communication processes C. Decision-making process D. Stages of group development E. Leadership 4. Management and organization theory A. Planning, organizing, leading, and controlling B. Problem solving and decision making C. Systems theory D. Contingency theory E. Organization structure F. Characteristics of environment and technology G. Models of organization and system 5. Research methods/statistics A. Measures of central tendency B. Measures of dispersion C. Basic sampling theory D. Basic experimental design E. Sample inferential statistics

CORE COMPETENCIES 1. Organization design: the decision process associated with formulating and aligning the elements of an organizational system, including but not limited to structural systems, human resource systems, information systems, reward systems, work design, political systems, and organization culture A. The concept of fit and alignment B. Diagnostic and design model for various sub-systems that make up an organization at any level of analysis, including the structure of work, human resources, information systems, reward systems, work design, political systems, and so on C. Key thought leaders in organization design 2. Organization research: field research methods; interviewing; content analysis; design of questionnaires and interview protocol; designing change evaluation processes; longitudinal data collection and analysis; understanding and detecting alpha, beta, and gamma change; and a host of quantitative and qualitative methods 3. System dynamics: the description and understanding of how systems evolve and develop over time, how systems respond to exogenous and endogenous disruption as well as planned interventions (e.g., evolution and revolution, punctuated equilibrium theory, chaos theory, catastrophe theory, incremental vs. quantum change, transformation theory, and so on) continued

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[Table 3.1] Knowledge and Skill Requirements of OD Practitioners, (continued ) FOUNDATION COMPETENCIES 6. Comparative cultural perspectives A. Dimensions of natural culture B. Dimensions of industry culture C. Systems implications 7. Functional knowledge of business A. Interpersonal communication (listening, feedback, and articulation) B. Collaboration/working together C. Problem solving D. Using new technology E. Conceptualizing F. Project management G. Present/education/coach

Skills

CORE COMPETENCIES 4. History of organization development and change: an understanding of the social, political, economic, and personal forces that led to the emergence and development of organization development and change, including the key thought leaders, the values underlying their writings and actions, the key events and writings, and related documentation A. Human relations movement B. NTL/T-groups/sensitivity training C. Survey research D. Quality of work life E. Tavistock Institute F. Key thought leaders G. Humanistic values H. Statement of ethics 5. Theories and models for change: the basic action research model, participatory action research model, planning model, change typologies (e.g., fast, slow, incremental, quantum, revolutionary), Lewin’s model, transition models, and so on 1. Managing the consulting process: the ability to enter, contract, diagnose, design appropriate interventions, implement those interventions, manage unprogrammed events, and evaluate change process 2. Analysis/diagnosis: the abilities to conduct an inquiry into a system’s effectiveness, to see the root cause(s) of a system’s current level of effectiveness; the core skill is interpreted to include all systems—individual, group, organization, and multiorganization—as well as the ability to understand and inquire into one’s self

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[Table 3.1] Knowledge and Skill Requirements of OD Practitioners FOUNDATION COMPETENCIES

CORE COMPETENCIES 3. Designing/choosing appropriate, relevant interventions: understanding how to select, modify, or design effective interventions that will move the organization from its current state to its desired future state 4. Facilitation and process consultation: the ability to assist an individual or group toward a goal; the ability to conduct an inquiry into individual and group processes such that the client system maintains ownership of the issue, increases its capacity for reflection on the consequences of its behaviors and actions, and develops a sense of increased control and ability 5. Developing client capability: the ability to conduct a change process in such a way that the client is better able to plan and implement a successful change process in the future, using technologies of planned change in a values-based and ethical manner 6. Evaluating organization change: the ability to design and implement a process to evaluate the impact and effects of change intervention, including control of alternative explanations and interpretation of performance outcomes

competence in those areas may take considerable time and effort, and it is questionable whether the other two types of OD practitioners—managers and specialists in related fields—also need that full range of skills and knowledge. It seems more reasonable to suggest that some subset of the items listed in Table 3.1 should apply to all OD practitioners, whether they are OD professionals, managers, or related specialists. Those items would constitute the practitioner’s basic skills and knowledge. Beyond that background, the three types of OD practitioners likely would differ in areas of concentration. OD professionals would extend their breadth of skills across the remaining categories in Table 3.1; managers would focus on the functional knowledge of business areas; and related specialists would concentrate on skills in their respective areas.

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Based on the data in Table 3.1 and the other studies available, all OD practitioners should have the following basic skills and knowledge to be effective. Intrapersonal Skills or “Self-Management” Competence. Despite the growing knowledge base and sophistication of the field, organization development is still a human craft. As the primary instrument of diagnosis and change, practitioners often must process complex, ambiguous information and make informed judgments about its relevance to organizational issues. The core competency of analysis and diagnosis listed in Table 3.1 includes the ability to inquire into one’s self, and as noted above, it remains one of the cornerstone skills in OD.10 Practitioners must have the personal centering to know their own values, feelings, and purposes as well as the integrity to behave responsibly in a helping relationship with others. Bob Tannenbaum, one of the founders of OD, argued that self-knowledge is the most central ingredient in OD practice and suggested that practitioners are becoming too enamored with skills and techniques.11 There are data to support his view. A study of 416 OD practitioners found that 47% agreed with the statement, “Many of the new entrants into the field have little understanding of or appreciation for the history or values underlying the field.”12 Because OD is a highly uncertain process requiring constant adjustment and innovation, practitioners must have active learning skills and a reasonable balance between their rational and emotional sides. Finally, OD practice can be highly stressful and can lead to early burnout, so practitioners need to know how to manage their own stress. Interpersonal Skills. Practitioners must create and maintain effective relationships with individuals and groups within the organization and help them gain the competence necessary to solve their own problems. Table 3.1 identifies group dynamics, comparative cultural perspectives, and business functions as foundation knowledge, and managing the consulting proc...