Organization development (OD) is the study and implementation of practices, systems, and techniques that affect organizational change. The goal of which is to modify a group's/organization's performance and/or culture. The organizational changes are typically initiated by the group's stakeholders. OD emerged from human relations studies in the 1930s, during which psychologists realized that organizational structures and processes influence worker behavior and motivation.
Organization Development allows businesses to construct and maintain a brand new preferred state for the whole agency. Key concepts of OD theory include: organizational climate (the mood or unique "personality" of an organization, which includes attitudes and beliefs that influence members' collective behavior), organizational culture (the deeply-seated norms, values, and behaviors that members share) and organizational strategies (how an organization identifies problems, plans action, negotiates change and evaluates progress). A key aspect of OD is to review organizational identity.
Overview
Organization development as a practice involves an ongoing, systematic process of implementing effective organizational change. OD is both a field of applied science focused on understanding and managing organizational change and a field of scientific study and inquiry. It is interdisciplinary in nature and draws on sociology, psychology, particularly industrial and organizational psychology, and theories of motivation, learning, and personality. Although behavioral science has provided the basic foundation for the study and practice of OD, new and emerging fields of study have made their presence felt. Experts in systems thinking, in organizational learning, in the structure of intuition in decision-making, and in coaching (to name a few) whose perspective is not steeped in just the behavioral sciences, but in a much more multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary approach, have emerged as OD catalysts or tools.
History
Kurt Lewin (1898–1947) is the founding father of OD, although he died before the concept became mainstream in the mid-1950s. From Lewin came the ideas of group dynamics and action research which underpin the basic OD process as well as providing its collaborative consultant/client ethos. Institutionally, Lewin founded the "Research Center for Group Dynamics" (RCGD) at MIT, which moved to Michigan after his death. RCGD colleagues were among those who founded the National Training Laboratories (NTL), from which the T-groups and group-based OD emerged.
Kurt Lewin played a key role in the evolution of organization development as it is known today. As early as World War II (1939-1945), Lewin experimented with a collaborative change-process (involving himself as a consultant and a client group) based on a three-step process of planning, taking action, and measuring results. This was the forerunner of action research, an important element of OD, which will be discussed later. Lewin also initiated a learning method known as laboratory training, or T-groups. After Lewin's death in 1947, his close associates helped to develop survey-research methods at the University of Michigan. These procedures became important parts of OD as developments in this field continued at the National Training Laboratories and in growing numbers of universities and private consulting-firms across the country. Leading universities offering doctoral-level degrees in OD include Benedictine University and the Fielding Graduate University.
Douglas and Richard Beckhard, while "consulting together at General Mills in the 1950s [...] coined the term organization development (OD) to describe an innovative bottom-up change effort that fit no traditional consulting categories" (Weisbord, 1987, p. 112).