Future Of Organizational Development

TRENDS WITHIN OD AND THEIR IMPACT ON OD’S FUTURE TRADITIONAL •Return to original humanistic values •Increasing focus on process intervention

ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT will:

PRAGMATIC •Emphasize values of effectiveness •Increasing focus on relevant practice ACADEMIC •Emphasize values of understanding, prediction, and control •Search for variable that explain change and effectiveness

•Have more conflict in the short term •Be more integrated in the long term

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 TECHNOLOGY • More E-commerce • Faster organizational process • More productivity ORGANIZATIONS • More networked • More Knowledge, learning, and innovation based

ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOMENT will be: •More embedded in the organization’s operations •More technologically enabled •Shorter OD cycle times •More interdisciplinary •More diverse in client organization •More cross –cultural •More concerned with

Traditional The first trend has to do with increasing calls for a return to OD’s traditional and others, 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 collude 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 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 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 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. In coming years, new technologies such as groupware and video conferencing, will increasingly be used to bring more people together faster than ever before. There is a real 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.

Concepts that can be used to describe systems change and may yield new insights into the change process • • • • • •

Emergence Instability Phase transitions Bifurcation self-organization Strange attractors

Concepts that are to be translated into frameworks useful for OD practitioners Small worlds Synchrony Connectedness Cascades Interaction Rules

OD will be Applied to More Diverse Organizations In the future planned change will be applied to a more 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.

New concepts, frameworks and philosophies that Represents opportunities to make ecological sustainability a more deliberate and intentional value of organizational growth • Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economics (CERES) • Natural Capitalism – suggests that business strategies build around the productive use of natural resources can solve environmental problems at a profit. • Natural Step – proposes a set of guidelines for development and a process of change that aligns with an OD perspective. It utilizes four system

conditions • Substances from within the earth must not systematically increase in the ecosphere • Substances produced by society must not systematically increase in the ecosphere • The physical ability of nature to renew itself must not be diminished • The basic human needs of all people need to be met with fairness and efficiency