Creating a Climate for Change

Most OD practitioners would agree that an open give-and-take relationship with the client is desirable. To some extent this depends on the ability of the practitioner to form relationships of openness and trust.
Good relationships do not fit into a formula or equation, but OD practitioners have noted a number of recognizable characteristics of which the practitioner may be aware. “The change agent should act congruently, in accordance with the values he or she is attempting to superimpose upon the client system’s value system. To use an old expression, the practitioner should practice what he or she preaches. The practitioner must think and act in ways that will create and enhance a positive climate for participation and learning.
The basic value system of the OD practitioner may not be compatible with the organization’s culture. As a result, there may be conflicts between the value systems of the practitioner and the client system. An assessment of the degree of difference and the likelihood of working these differences through should be part of the OD practitioner’s initial intervention. The practitioner may desire to create a relationship of openness, authenticity, and trust. The client system managers, however, may tend not to be open, may have learned not to behave authentically, and may even feel threatened by an exploration of feelings or confrontation by the practitioner; the practitioner may have reservations about the probability of a successful program. The practitioner also examines the degree of conflict and collaboration between organization units and needs to be aware of this to avoid being party to any existing conflicts. “One of the most frequent forms of resistance to change,” comments OD authority Ronald Lippitt, “is the perception by certain subgroups, that the consultant is more closely related to other subgroups and is ‘on their side’ in any conflict of interests.”
Who is Client?
One may say, the client is….
1. Company president
2. Top management group
3. Employee relations person
4. Total company
5. Parent corporation
6. All of the above
7. None of the above.
The correct answer is (7), “none of the above.” The client in OD consultation is never one individual, regardless of position or role, or any particular group, team, or subsystem of the organization, or any combination thereof.
The degree to which a consultant is effective is a function of how capable he or she is at maintaining a certain social distance between self and other individuals in the client organization and its operating on the boundaries of units rather than exclusively within them. In these ways, the consultant can more readily maintain an objective stance between persons and units in conflict rather than being with one or the other.

The Organization Development Practitioner

A closer look at OD practitioners can provide a more personal perspective on the field and can help us understand the essential character of OD as a helping profession, involving 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 problems, developing solutions, and helping to implement them. More recent perspectives expand the practice scope to include professionals in related disciplines, such as industrial psychology and organization theory, as well as line managers who have learned how to carry out OD to change and develop their departments.
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 role can be described in relation to the position of practitioners: internal to the organization, external to it, or in a team comprising both internal and external consultants. The OD role also can 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?
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 organization clients, including top managers, functional  epartment 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 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.
Second: the term OD practitioner applies to people specializing in fields related to OD, such as reward systems, organization design, total quality, information technology, and business strategy. These contentoriented
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. For example is the result of marrying OD with business strategy. 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 have diversified into management consulting and change management. 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 relations, management consulting, information systems, health care, and work design. 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.
Third: the term OD practitioner applies to 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 applied by managers rather than OD professionals is growing rapidly. They 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, Hewlett-Packard, and 3M, where managers and employees have become "change masters. 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 variety of workshops offered by the National Training Laboratories, the Center for Creative Leadership, the Gestalt Institute, UCLA's Extension Service, University Associates, and others. Line managers increasingly are attending such external programs. Moreover, a growing number of organizations, including Texas Instruments, Motorola, and General Electric, have instituted in-house 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 of OD practitioner, one with a greater diversity of values, skills, and experience than a traditional practitioner.

Degree of Organization

Planned change efforts also can vary depending on the degree to which the organization or client system is organized. In over organized situations, such as in highly mechanistic, bureaucratic organizations, various dimensions such as leadership styles, job designs, organization structure, and policies and procedures are too rigid and overly defined for effective task performance. Communication between management and employees is typically suppressed, conflicts are avoided, and employees are apathetic. In under organized organizations, on the other hand, there is too little constraint or regulation for effective task performance.
Leadership, structure, job design, and policy are poorly defined and fail to control task behaviors effectively. Communication is fragmented, job responsibilities are ambiguous, and employees' energies are dissipated because they lack direction. Underorganized situations are typically found in such .areas as product development, project management, and community development, where relationships among diverse groups and participants must be coordinated around complex, uncertain tasks.
In over organized situations, where much of OD practice has historically taken place, planned change is generally aimed at loosening constraints on behavior. Changes in leadership, job design, structure, and other features are designed to liberate suppressed energy, to increase the flow of relevant information between employees and managers, and to promote effective conflict resolution. The typical steps of planned change — entry, diagnosis, intervention, and evaluation — are intended to penetrate a relatively closed organization or department and make it increasingly open to self-diagnosis and revitalization. The relationship between the OD practitioner and the management team attempts to model this loosening process. The consultant shares leadership of the change process with management, encourages open communications and confrontation of conflict, and maintains flexibility in relating to the organization.
When applied to organizations facing problems in being under organized, planned change is aimed at increasing organization by clarifying leadership rules, structuring communication between, managers and employees, and specifying job and departmental responsibilities. These activities require a modification of the traditional phases of planned change and include the following four steps.
1. Identification: This step identifies the relevant people or groups who need to be involved in the change program. In many under organized situations, people and departments can be so disconnected that there is ambiguity about who should be included in the problem-solving process. For example, when managers of different departments have only limited interaction with each other, they may disagree or be confused about which departments should be involved in developing a new product or service.
2. Convention: In this step the relevant people or departments in the company are brought together to begin organizing for task performance. For example, department, managers might be asked to attend a series of organizing meetings to discuss the division of labor and the coordination required to introduce a new product.
3. Organization: Different organizing mechanisms are created to structure the newly required interactions among people and departments. This might include creating new leadership positions, establishing communication channels, and specifying appropriate plans and policies.
4. Evaluation: In this final step the outcomes of the organization step are assessed. The evaluation might signal the need for adjustments in the organizing process or for further identification, convention, and organization activities.
In carrying out these four steps of planned change in under organized situations, the relationship between the OD practitioner and the client system attempts to reinforce the organizing process. The consultant develops a well-defined leadership role, which might be autocratic during the early stages of the change program. Similarly, the consulting relationship is clearly defined and tightly specified. In effect, the interaction between the consultant and the client system supports the larger process of bringing order to the situation.

Contemporary Adaptations of Action Research

The action research model underlies most current approaches to planned change and is often identified with the practice of OD. Recently, action research has been extended to new settings and applications, and consequently researchers and practitioners have made requisite adaptations of its basic framework. Trends in the application of action research include movement from smaller sub-units of organizations to total systems and communities. In those larger contexts, action research is more complex and political than in smaller settings. Therefore, the action research cycle is coordinated across multiple change processes and includes a diversity of stakeholders who have an interest in the organization.
Action research also is applied increasingly in international settings, particularly in developing nations in the southern hemisphere. Embedded within the action research model, however, are "northern-hemisphere" assumptions about change. For example, action research traditionally views change more linearly than do Eastern cultures, and it treats the change process more collaboratively than do Latin American and African countries. To achieve success in those settings, action research is tailored to fit cultural assumptions.
Finally, action research is applied increasingly to promote social change and innovation, as demonstrated most clearly in community development and global social change projects. Those applications are heavily value laden and seek to redress imbalances in power and resource allocations across different groups.
Action researchers tend to play an activist role in the change process, which is often chaotic and confliction.
In light of these general trends, action research has undergone two key adaptations. First, contemporary applications have increased substantially the degree of member involvement in the change process. That contrasts with traditional approaches to planned change, whereby consultants carried out most of the change activities, with the agreement and collaboration of management. Although consultant-dominated change still persists in OD, there is a growing tendency to involve organization members in learning about their organization and about how to change it. Referred to as "participatory action research," "action learning," "action science," "self-design “or” appreciative inquiry," this approach to plan change emphasizes the need for organization members to learn firsthand about planned change if they are to gain the knowledge and skills needed to change the organization. In today's complex and changing environment, some argue that OD must go beyond solving particular problems to helping members gain the competence needed to change and improve the organization continually.
In this modification of action research, the role of OD consultants is to work with members to facilitate the learning process. Both parties are "co-learners" in diagnosing the organization, designing changes, and implementing and assessing them. Neither party dominates the change process. Rather, each participant brings unique information and expertise to the situation, and they combine their resources to learn how to change the organization. Consultants, for example, know how to design diagnostic instruments and OD interventions, and organization members have local knowledge about the organization and how it functions. Each participant learns from the change process. Organization members learn how to change their organization and how to refine and improve it. OD consultants learn how to facilitate complex organizational change and learning.
The second adaptation to action research is the integration of an "interpretive or "social constructionist" approach to planned change. Called "appreciative inquiry," this model proposes that words and conversations determine what is important and meaningful in organizational life. Take, for example, the work group whose daily conversations are dominated by management feedback that its costs are too high. Even if the group performs well on quality and customer satisfaction, the focus on cost problems can lead group members to believe that the group is a poor performer. Accordingly, this approach to change involves starting new conversations that drive new shared meanings of key goals, processes, and achievements.
Proponents of appreciative inquiry point out that most organizational conversations are focused on poor financial results or on how the organization could be better, on the gap between where the organization is and where it wants to be, and on the problems it faces. Metaphorically, organizations are like problems to be solved and the conversations among members dwell on the organization's faults. Appreciative inquiry challenges that assumption. It suggests that the most important change an organization can make is to begin conversations about what the organization is doing right. Appreciative inquiry helps organization members to understand and describe their organization when it is working at its best. That knowledge is then applied to creating a powerful and guiding image of what the organization could be. Broad involvement of organization members in creating the vision starts a new conversation about the organization's potential and creates a new focus and positive expectation. Considerable research on expectation effects supports this positive approach to planned change. It suggests that people tend to act in ways that make their expectations occur: a positive vision of the organization's future energizes and directs behavior to make that expectation come about.
Planned change emphasizes member involvement and starts with which organization features to examine. For example, members can choose to look for successful male-female collaboration (as opposed to sexual discrimination), instances of customer satisfaction (as opposed to customer dissatisfaction), particularly effective work teams, or product development processes that brought new ideas to market especially fast. If the focus of inquiry is real and vital to organization members, the change process itself will take on these positive attributes. The second step involves gathering data about the "best of what is" in the organization.
A broad array of organization members is involved in developing data-gathering instruments, collecting information, and analyzing it. In the third step, members examine the data to find stories, however small, that present a truly exciting and possible picture of the future. From those stories, members develop "possibility propositions"—statements that bridge the organization's current best practices with ideal possibilities for future organizing. That effort redirects attention from "what is" to "what might be." In step four, relevant stakeholders are brought together to construct a vision of the future and to devise action plans for moving in that direction. The vision becomes a statement of "what should be." Finally, implementation of those plans proceeds similarly to the action and assessment phases of action research described previously. Members make changes, assess the results, and make necessary adjustments, and so on as they move the organization toward the vision.

The Organization Culture has impacts

“The culture of an organization is its customary and traditional way of thinking and doing things, which is shared to a greater or lesser degree by all its members, and which new members must learn and at least partially accept, in order to be accepted into service in the firm. Culture covers a wide range of behavior: the methods of production; job skills and technical knowledge; attitudes towards discipline and punishment; the custom and habit of managerial behavior; its way of doing business; the methods of payment; the values placed on different types of work; beliefs in democratic living and joint consultation”.
Culture shows up in both visible and invisible ways. Some manifestations of this energy field called "culture" are easy to observe. You can see the dress code, work environment, perks, and titles in a company. This is the surface layer of culture. These are only some of the visible manifestations of a culture.
The far more powerful aspects of culture are invisible. The cultural core is composed of the beliefs, values, standards, paradigms, worldviews, moods, internal conversations, and private conversations of the people that are part of the group. This is the foundation for all actions and decisions within a team, department, or organization.
Visible Manifestations of Culture:
• Dress Code
• Work Environment
• Benefits
• Perks
• Conversations
• Work/Life Balance
• Titles & Job Description
• Organizational Structure
Invisible Manifestations of Culture:
• Values
• Private Conversations (with self or confidants)
• Invisible Rules
• Attitudes
• Beliefs
• Worldviews
• Moods and Emotions
• Unconscious Interpretations
• Standards of Behavior
• Paradigms
• Assumptions
Business leaders often assume that their company's vision, values, and strategic priorities are synonymous with their company's culture. Unfortunately, too often, the vision, values, and strategic priorities may only be words hanging on a plaque on the wall. In a thriving profitable company, employees will embody the values, vision, and strategic priorities of their company. What creates this embodiment (or lack of embodiment) is the culture that permeates the employees' psyches, bodies, conversations, and actions. The energy fields that make up a group's culture are dynamic and change continuously. Culture is created and constantly reinforced on a daily basis through conversations, symbols, rituals, written materials, and body language. It is the small, mundane actions and behaviors that create a culture and can shift a culture. Creating and sustaining a healthy, vibrant culture requires reinforcement of the culture through daily and proactive conversations and communications. The failure to discuss the values, purpose, and rules within a group often leads to a culture that is at cross purposes with the stated intention of the group. Poor communication creates a lot of confusion and often a crisis of meaninglessness.
Since a culture is created every time a group of people come together to form a team, a company will have
any sub-cultures that exist within its main culture. Within the company, there may be sub-cultures in departments, divisions, regions or operating units. For example, the marketing and technology teams may have different worldviews, jargon, work hours, and ways to do things. A big challenge for today's company is to create a strong, cohesive corporate culture that pulls all of the sub-cultures together and ensures that they can work as a unified team.
Corporate culture starts when the organization begins and develops as it grows. Corporate culture controls the way the people in an organization interact with each other and the stakeholders outside the organization. Over time, the culture changes as people come and go. Culture reflects the values, ethics, beliefs, personality and traits of the company's founders, management and employees. In a well-established company, the culture is so strong that even new top management may not be able to change it. Or, if they try, it may take 5, 10 or 20 years to change. Employees who feel comfortable and compatible with the company culture will stay; those who don't will leave or will not perform as well as they can.
Culture is extremely powerful. The rules of the game, what behavior is ethical and accepted, the mood of the organization, and the enthusiasm of employees are all contained in the culture. So, culture can be a powerful, hidden asset or it can be a liability - a time-bomb waiting to go off. If your leadership team has not pro-actively created a corporate culture to support the company's purpose, then chances are that the culture is a hidden liability.
Every time people come together with a shared purpose, culture is created. This group of people could be a family, neighborhood, project team, or company. Culture is automatically created out of the combined thoughts, energies, and attitudes of the people in the group.
Have you ever noticed how people react to foreign visitors; whether an exchange student or a visiting professional? The stranger may be welcomed, but may never be accepted unless that person can adapt to the norms of their new environment. If they do not, the members will shun the stranger and reject the alien from their culture. The same is true in business. If the new employee, consultant or visitor cannot adapt to the corporate culture, their chances for success are slight. The members of the culture will reject the person outright and will work against them.
The reason for this phenomenon is because people tend to prefer conformity in their culture. Conformity represents a harmonious environment where the behavior and actions are predictable. Most people have a deeply rooted desire for a sense of order and stability in their lives, which is what conformity provides. A stable environment promotes self-confidence in the members of the culture and allows them to concentrate on their work.
Culture is an energy force that becomes woven through the thinking, behavior, and identity of those within the group. Culture is powerful and invisible and its manifestations are far reaching. Culture determines a company's dress code, work environment, work hours, rules for getting ahead and getting promoted, how the business world is viewed, what is valued, who is valued, and much more.
The term organization culture refers to a system of shared meanings, including the language, dress, patterns of behavior, value system, feelings, attitudes, interactions, and group norms of the members. Examine the patterns of behavior on your campus or in your company.

A Model for Organizational Development

Organization development is a continuing process of long-term organizational improvement consisting of a series of stages; the emphasis is placed on a combination of individual, team, and organizational relationships.
The primary difference between OD and other behavioral science techniques is the emphasis upon viewing the organization as a total system of interacting and interrelated elements. Organization development is the application of an organization-wide approach to the functional, structural, technical, and personal relationships in organizations. OD programs are based upon a systematic analysis of problems and a top management actively committed to the change effort. The purpose of such a program is to increase organizational effectiveness by the application of OD values and techniques. Many organization development programs use the action research model. Action research involves collecting information about the organization, feeding this information back to the client system, and developing and implementing action programs to improve system performance. The manager also needs to be aware of the processes that should be considered when one is attempting to create change. This section presents a five-stage model of the total organization development process. Each stage is dependent on the preceding one, and successful change is more probable when each of these stages is considered in a logical sequence. 

The Challenge for Organizations

We live in a world that has been turned upside down. Companies are pouring money, technology, and management expertise into regions that were once off limits, acquiring new enterprises, forming joint ventures, creating new global businesses from the ground up. Many major companies are going through significant changes, including outsourcing, downsizing, reengineering, self-managed work teams, flattening organizations, and doing routine jobs with automation and computers. Some experts contend that if you can describe a job precisely or write rules for doing it, the job will probably not survive.
Change is avalanching down upon our heads and most people are utterly unprepared to cope with it. Tomorrow’s world will be different from todays, calling for new organizational approaches. Organizations will need to be adapting to these changes market conditions and at the same time coping with the need for a renewing rather than reactive workforce. Every day managers are confronting massive and accelerating change. As one writer comments, “Call it whatever you like – reengineering, restructuring, transformation, flattening, downsizing, rightsizing, a quest for global competitiveness – it’s real, it’s radical and it’s arriving
every day at a company near you.”
Global competition and economic downturns have exposed a glaring weakness in American organizations: the fact that many organizations have become overstaffed, cumbersome, slow and inefficient. To increase productivity, enhance competitiveness and contain costs, organizations are changing the way they are organized and managed.
The successful twenty-first century manager must deal with a chaotic world of new competitors and constant innovation. In the future the only winning companies will be the ones that respond quickly to change. Preparing managers to cope with today’s accelerating role of change is the central theme/purpose of my lectures (concern of this book). Modern manager must not only be flexible and adaptive in achanging environment but must also be able to diagnose problems and implement change programs.
Tom Peters suggests that “the time for 10 percent staff cuts and 20 percent quality improvement is past”.
Organizations are never completely static. They are in continuous interaction with external forces. Changing consumer lifestyles and technological breakthroughs all act on the organization to cause it to change. The degree of change may vary from one organization to another, but all face the need for adaptation to external forces. Many of these changes are forced upon the organization, whereas others are generated internally. Because change is occurring so rapidly, there is a need for new ways to manage it.