Untitled Quiz

Organization Development and Change

• Organization development (OD) is a process used to enhance both the effectiveness of an organization and the well-being of its members through planned interventions.
• OD enhances the effectiveness of the organization by achieving organizational goals and objectives.
• OD enhances the well-being of organizational members.
• OD is used to enhance the effectiveness of organizations and individual well-being through planned interventions.
• Planned interventions are sets of structured activities. Target groups or individuals engage in activities related to organizational improvement.

OD Theories and Concepts

• Change process theory: explains the dynamics of organizational improvement and change.
• Three stages:
  • Unfreezing (readiness): getting people to accept that change is inevitable and stop resisting it.
  • Moving (adoption): getting people to accept the new, desired state.
  • Refreezing (institutionalization): making the new practices and behaviors a permanent part of the operation or role expectations.
• Schein's three-stage model:
  • Stage 1 (Unfreezing): Creating motivation and readiness to change.
    • Disconfirmation or Lack of Confirmation
    • Creation of Guilt or Anxiety
    • Provision of Psychological Safety
  • Stage 2 (Changing): Changing through cognitive restructuring.
    • Identifying with a new role model
    • Scanning the environment for new relevant information
  • Stage 3 (Refreezing): Refreezing — Helping the individual to integrate the new point of view into his or her total personality and self-concept and significant relationships.

Promoting Readiness to Change

• Discrepancy: the gap between the current and an ideal state—addresses the question: "Why change?"
• Efficacy: confidence in the individual and group's ability to make the change—addresses the question: "Can we do this?"
• Appropriateness: perception that this is the right response to correct the discrepancy identified—addresses the question: "Why this change?"
• Principal support: key organizational leaders support this change;
• Valence: the intrinsic and extrinsic benefits of the change;

Implementation Theory

• Focuses on specific intervention strategies designed to induce changes.
• Four Types of Interventions:
  • Human process-based: emphasizes the process of change—changing behaviors by modifying attitudes, values, problem-solving approaches, and interpersonal styles.
  • Techno-structural: focuses on improving work content, work method, work flow, performance factors, and relationships among workers. A key concept is job design.
  • Socio-technical systems (STS) designs: directed at the fit between the technological configuration and the social structure of work units—results in the rearrangement of relationships among roles or tasks to produce self-maintaining, semiautonomous groups. Empowering the worker to assume more lateral responsibility.
  • Large system: views organizations as complex, human systems, possessing unique character, culture, and value system. Procedures must be continuously examined, analyzed, and improved for optimal productivity and motivation.

Limitations of OD Research

• Lack of true experimental designs.
• Lack of resources for OD practitioners.
• Limitations of field research designs.
• Potential bias by OD evaluators (who are often the designers of the intervention).
• Simply "lack of motivation" by the OD evaluator.

Model of Planned Change

• Four distinct parts to this model:
  • Change Intervention
  • Organizational Target Variables
  • Individual Organizational Member
  • Organizational Outcomes

Types of Individual Cognitive Change

• Alpha changes: perceive a change in the levels of variables (e.g., improvement in skills) without altering their configuration (e.g., job design).
• Beta changes: perceive a change in the value of variables (e.g., change in work standards) within an existing paradigm.
• Gamma (A) changes: perceive a change in the configuration of an existing paradigm without adding new variables (e.g., product-driven vs. cost-containment).
• Gamma (B): perceive a replacement of one paradigm with another.

Gamma Changes

• Gamma A and B Changes: refer to changes occurring at the organization level. - Gamma A Changes: directed at the manner in which the operations mission or philosophy is accomplished, but where the core mission remains intact. - Gamma B Changes: Directed at the core mission or philosophy.

Organizational Outcomes

• Focuses on how individual behavioral changes can lead to improved organizational performance and enhanced individual development.

Designing an Intervention Strategy

• Diagnose the Environment
• Develop an Action Plan: specifies the intervention strategy.
• Evaluate results of the intervention.

Role of HRD Practitioners

• Two primary roles: serve as change agents and evaluators of intervention strategies.

The Role of Labor Unions

• Management must view union leaders as partners in the change emphasizing their commitment, along with top managers'.
• Both groups need fundamental changes in accountability and employee job performance.
• This is usually a cooperative agreement.

Human Process-Based Interventions

• Directed at improving interpersonal, intra-group, and inter-group relations.
  • Two major types: survey feedback and team building.

Survey Feedback

• Systematic feedback of survey data to groups to stimulate discussion, generate solutions, and motivate change.
• Data provide a snapshot of an existing situation.

Developing a Survey

• Agreement on:
  • Organizational variables to measure
  • Survey design and implementation to ensure reliable and valid data
  • How best to present results to the intended audience.

Team Building

• Process used to improve a work group's ability and effectiveness.
• Groups can become dysfunctional: relationships strained, conflicts increase, group output declines, higher likelihood of members quitting.
• Group effectiveness depends on three factors—output meeting standards, the process enhancing member capabilities, and the group experience contributing to member well-being.

Actions Prior to Team Building

• Preliminary diagnosis of the group's need.
• Selection of a change agent.
• Development of a general approach to team-building sessions by the change manager and change agent.

Effectiveness of Human Process-Based Interventions

• Team building is the most effective human process-based intervention.
• Team building has a strong effect on productivity measures.

Techno-Structural Interventions

• Purpose is to improve work content, work method, relationships among workers, lower costs, replace inefficient factors, methods, and equipment, work-flow designs, and costly labor with efficient technology.

Three Methods of TSI

• Job enlargement
• Job enrichment
• Alternative work schedules

Job Enlargement Interventions

• Attempts to increase satisfaction and performance by consolidating work functions from a horizontal slice of the work unit to provide variety and a sense of the whole task.

Job Enrichment

• Involves varying job aspects to increase motivation for workers.
• Core job dimensions affect outcomes such as job satisfaction. Emphasizing meaningfulness of work, responsibility for work outcomes, and knowledge of work results.

Alternative Work Schedules (AWS)

• Allows employees to modify work requirements to satisfy personal needs.
• Two common AWS interventions: compressed workweek and flextime.

Effectiveness of Techno-Structural Interventions

• Alternative work schedules and job redesign have a moderate effect on work output such as quality and quantity of production.
• Work rescheduling interventions had a small but significant effect on withdrawal behavior.
• Technostructural interventions have less impact than human process-based interventions.

Socio-Technical Systems (STS)

• Focus on the combination of organizational structural demands and social demands like work flow, task accomplishment, performance and relationships among workers.

The Quality Circle (QC) Approach

• Gets employees involved in meaning work decisions including solving job-related problems.

Common Characteristics

• QC roles: steering committee, facilitator, and circle leader.
• Training in group process, problem diagnosis, problem-solving skills.
• Regular circle meetings to discuss improvement of work procedures.

Overall Effectiveness of QCs

• Mixed reviews
• Significant effects on cognitive measures of competence, interpersonal trust, and task environment properties like goal congruence
• QC participants reported greater organizational attachment as the study progressed.

Total Quality Management (TQM)

• Set of concepts and tools for getting all employees focused on continuous improvement in customer eyes.

Five Basic TQM Components

• Total commitment from senior management.
• Quality standards and measures.
• Training for employees.
• Communication.
• Reward, recognition, and celebration.

Implementing TQM

• Senior management guides TQM implementation.
• Quality standards and measures serve as benchmarks.
• TQM emphasizes the role of each manager in reducing cost.

Providing Critical TQM Training

• Quality training is critical.
• Organizations need major investment in TQM training.

TQM Training

• Sensitize managers to TQM philosophy and principles.
• Managers need awareness training and instruction.
• Employees may need SPC techniques to aid "Six Sigma" interventions.
• Include team building in quality training programs due to their common inclusion in TQM interventions.

Rewards, Recognition, and Celebration

• Three kinds of rewards: Individual monetary rewards, Group monetary awards, Non-monetary rewards.

Self-Managed Teams (SMTs)

• Formal groups where members are interdependent, and have authority to regulate team activities.

Common SMT Characteristics

• Interdependent relationships among team members.
• Discretion over work assignments, methods, schedules, training, and external customer/supplier dealings.
• Team members have multiple skills for task performance.
• Teams receive performance feedback.

Demonstrated SMT Benefits

• Increased productivity
• Higher quality products/services
• Increased employee morale
• Reduced/flatter management hierarchy
• More responsive organizational structures

SMT Effectiveness Indicators

• Increased productivity, quality, safety, fewer customer complaints, and less absenteeism.

Differences Between TQM and SMT Interventions

• TQM is participative but may not equalize power.
• SMTs empower teams with decision-making authority without supervisor concurrence.
• TQM doesn't typically have this authority, and SMT requires a structural shift.

Role of HRD in STS

• HRD practitioners can design and implement training programs for effective STS interventions.
• Help employees adapt to new roles within STS design.
• Determine appropriate employee participation levels.

Two Types of Participation

• Representative: participation on committees (advisory, employee councils, grievance, safety).
• Consultative: participation directly on job-related issues that impact daily work life (approach used by the majority of SMTs).

Organization Transformation (OT)

• System of shared values, beliefs, and norms to interpret environmental elements and guide behavior.

Types of Change

• Cultural changes: complex process of replacing paradigms/ways of thinking with another.
• Strategic changes: fundamental changes in organizational purpose/mission requiring system-wide changes.

Cultural Changes

• Complex process of replacing an existing paradigm or way of thinking.

Mechanisms that Sustain Organizational Culture

• What managers pay attention to.
• The ways managers react to critical incidents.
• Role modeling, coaching, and training programs.
• Criteria for allocating rewards and status.
• Criteria for recruitment, selection, promotion, and removal.

Strategic Changes

• System-wide changes have three dimensions (size, depth, and pervasiveness) depending on the number of employees affected, the extent of structural or core value impact, and how many functions are impacted.

Organizational Learning

• Key components include an emphasis on learning.
• Managers and employees are expected to learn a common language, new tools and techniques, and take initiative in improving work outcomes.

Information Transfer

• Develop the capacity to transfer knowledge across the organization.
• TQM focus on specific tasks/processes can reduce flexible/adaptive thinking across the organization.

Learning Organization

• Organization in which individuals constantly identify and solve problems continuously experimenting, improving, and increasing capability.

Three Different Levels of Learning

• Single-loop learning: identify problems, take corrective action.
• Double-loop learning: understanding and changing assumptions/core values.
• Deuterolearning: directed at improving performance of single and double-loop learning.

Single-Loop Learning

• Common in continuous improvement programs—employees identify and correct problems.

Double-Loop Learning

• Changing basic assumptions and core values

Deuterolearning

• Highest level of learning; learning how to improve how to engage in single and double-loop learning.

Dimensions that Support Organizational Learning

• Structure (reducing hierarchical barriers).
• Information acquisition, sharing, and retention.
• HRM practices (performance appraisal, reward systems).
• Organization culture (shared beliefs).
• Leadership (executive and local line leaders, internal networkers).

High Performance Work Systems

• Multifaceted, involving different combinations of the intervention strategies.
• Common Characteristics: self-managed teams, quality circles, flatter structures, new flexible technologies, innovative compensation, increased training, continuous improvement.

Eight Core HPWS Principles

• Aligned to competitive strategy, customer-driven, aligned individual, team, and organizational goals, organized around processes.
• Work units linked to processes; workplace structures enhance focus, accountability, cycle time, and responsiveness
• Collaboration, trust, and mutual support; Strategic change management.

HPWS Framework

• Diagram outlining the relationships between strategy, organization, work practices and processes, HR systems, and desired HPWS outcomes. (Figure 14-3)

Role of HRD in OT

• Serve on strategic change committees and give advice on training/development.
• Help strategic planners look at various alternatives and their impact on people.
• Address the impact of mergers, acquisitions, and downsizing on workers.

HRD Applications as OD Interventions (Table 14-4)

• Provides links between HRD applications, organizational levels, and specific emphasis topics in organization interventions.

Eight Factors for Successful Organizational Change

• Ensure need, plan, internal support, top management commitment, external support, resources, institutionalization of change, comprehensive change.