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Part 

2

  People and Organizations

156

 

●

The work team, especially at the informal 

level, has great significance for feelings of 

satisfaction, and the dynamics of such teams 

have a powerful effect on the behaviour of 

their members.

 

●

Organizations can be more effective if they 

learn to diagnose their own strengths and 

weaknesses.

 

●

Managers often do not know what is wrong 

and need special help in diagnosing 

problems, although the outside ‘process 

consultant’ ensures that decision-making 

remains in the hands of the client.

Traditional OD programmes

OD during this time was practised predominantly by 

external consultants working with senior managers. 

Personnel specialists were not involved to any great 

extent. OD programmes consisted then of ‘interven-

tions’ such as those listed below. In OD jargon an 

intervention  is  a  planned  activity  designed  to  im-

prove organizational effectiveness or manage change. 

The following are the traditional OD interventions; 

they still feature in current programmes:

 

●

Process consultation – helping clients to 

generate and analyse information that they 

can understand and, following a thorough 

diagnosis, act upon. The information relates 

to organizational processes such as inter-

group relations, interpersonal relations and 

communications.

 

●

Change management – often using the 

techniques advocated by Lewin (1951), 

which consisted of processes of managing 

change by unfreezing, changing and freezing, 

and force-field analysis (analysing and 

dealing with the driving forces that affect 

transition to a future state).

 

●

Action research – collecting data from people 

about process issues and feeding it back in 

order to identify problems and their likely 

causes as a basis for an action plan to deal 

with the problem.

 

●

Appreciative enquiry – a methodology that 

does not focus entirely on finding out what is 

wrong in order to solve problems. Instead it 

adopts the more positive approach of 

identifying ‘best practices’ – what is working 

well – and using that information as a basis 

for planning change. It can be associated 

with action research.

 

●

Survey feedback – a variety of action research 

in which data is systematically collected 

about the system through attitude surveys 

and workshops leading to action plans.

 

●

Group dynamics – improving the ways in 

which people work together by means of 

programmes that aim to increase the 

effectiveness of groups through various forms 

of training, eg team building, interactive 

skills training and T-groups (‘training 

groups’, which aim to increase sensitivity, 

diagnostic ability and action skills).

 

●

Personal interventions – developing 

interpersonal skills through such processes  

as transactional analysis (an approach to 

understanding how people behave and express 

themselves through transactions with others), 

behaviour modelling (the use of positive 

reinforcement and corrective feedback to 

change behaviour) and neurolinguistic 

programming or NLP (teaching people to 

programme their reactions to others and 

develop unconscious strategies for interacting 

with them).