Organizational Development Chapter 3: Entering, Contracting, Diagnosing PDF

ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER 3: THE PROCESS OF ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT [ENTERING, CONTRACTING, DIAGNOSING] Entering into Organizational Development  Determining the relevant client can Relationship vary in complexity depending on t...

ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER 3: THE PROCESS OF ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT [ENTERING, CONTRACTING, DIAGNOSING] Entering into Organizational Development  Determining the relevant client can Relationship vary in complexity depending on the situation. In those cases where the  An OD process generally starts when a organizational issue can be addressed member of an organization or unit in a specific organization unit, client contacts an OD practitioner about definition is relatively straightforward. potential help in addressing an  Determining the relevant client is more organizational issue. complex when the organizational issue  The organization member may be a cannot readily be addressed in a single manager, staff specialist, or some other unit. key participant; the practitioner may be an OD professional from inside or Selecting an OD Practitioner outside of the organization.  The last activity involved in entering an  In helping assess these issues, the OD OD relationship is selecting an OD practitioner may need to collect practitioner who has the expertise and preliminary data about the experience to work with members on organization. the organizational issue.  This section describes the activities  Unfortunately, little systematic advice is involved in entering an OD relationship: available on how to choose a clarifying the organizational issue, competent OD professional, whether determining the relevant client, and from inside or outside of the selecting the appropriate OD organization. practitioner.  For less formal and structured selection Clarifying Organizational Issue processes, the late Gordon Lippitt, a  When seeking help from OD pioneering practitioner in the field, practitioners, organizations typically suggested several criteria for selecting, start with a presenting problem—the evaluating, and developing OD issue that has caused them to consider practitioners. an OD process.  One important consideration is whether  It may be specific (decreased market the consultant approaches the share, increased absenteeism) or organization with openness and an general (“we’re growing too fast,” “we insistence on diagnosis or whether the need to prepare for rapid changes”). practitioner appears to have a fixed  OD practitioners often examine program that is applicable to almost company records and interview a few any problem or organization. key members to gain an introductory  Certainly, OD consulting is as much a understanding of the organization, its person specialization as it is a task context, and the nature of the specialization. The OD professional presenting problem. needs not only a repertoire of technical  The diagnostic phase of OD involves a skills but also the personality and far more extensive assessment of the interpersonal competence to use problematic or development issue than himself or herself as an instrument of occurs during the entering and change. contracting stage. Determining the Relevant Client The Entering and Contracting Process  A second activity in entering an OD relationship is defining the relevant  Clarifying the Organizational Issue by client for addressing the organizational Presenting Problem and Symptoms issue.  Determining the Relevant Client  Generally, the relevant client includes through working power and authority those organization members who can and having multiple clients with multiple directly impact the change issue, contracts whether it is solving a particular  Selecting a Consultant problem or improving an already  Entering and contracting are the first successful organization or department. exchanges between a client and an OD practitioner. 1ST TERM 2024-2025 PROF. TOMAS ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER 3: THE PROCESS OF ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT [ENTERING, CONTRACTING, DIAGNOSING]  The organization’s current explicit contracting that results in either effectiveness and the request for help a verbal or a written agreement. may seem to the client like an  Such contracting clarifies the client’s admission that the organization is and the practitioner’s expectations incapable of solving the problem or about how the OD process will take providing the leadership necessary to place. achieve a set of results.  The contracting step in OD generally  Consciously or unconsciously, feelings addresses three key areas: setting of exposure, inadequacy, or mutual expectations or what each party vulnerability may lead clients to resist expects to gain from the OD process; coming to closure on the contract. the time and resources that will be  The OD practitioner must be alert to the devoted to it; and the ground rules for signs of resistance, such as asking for working together. extraordinary amounts of detail, and be Elements of an Effective Contract able to address them skilfully.  Mutual expectations are clear Developing a Contract This part of the contracting process  The activities of entering an OD focuses on the expectations of the relationship are a necessary prelude to client and the OD practitioner. The developing an OD contract. They client states the services and outcomes define the major focus for contracting, to be provided by the OD practitioner including the relevant parties. and describes what the organization  Contracting is a natural extension of expects from the process and the the entering process and clarifies how consultant. Clients usually can the OD pro- cess will proceed. It describe the desired outcomes, such typically establishes the expectations as lower costs or higher job of the parties, the time and resources satisfaction. Encouraging them to state that will be expended, and the ground their wants in the form of outcomes, rules under which the parties will working relationships, and personal operate. accomplishments can facilitate the  The goal of contracting is to make a development of a good contract. good decision about how to carry out - Outcomes and deliverales the OD process. It can be relatively - Publishing cases and informal and involve only a verbal results agreement between the client and the - Involvement of OD practitioner. A team leader with OD stakeholders skills, for example, may voice his or her  Time and Resources concerns to members about how the The organization and the OD team is functioning. After some practitioner must commit time and discussion, they might agree to devote resources to the effort. Each must be one hour of future meeting time to clear about how much energy and how diagnosing the team with the help of the many resources will be dedicated to the leader. Here, entering and contracting change process. Failure to make are done together, informally. explicit the necessary requirements of  In other cases, contracting can be more a change process can quickly ruin an protracted and result in a formal OD effort. For example, a client may document. That typically occurs when clearly state that the assignment organizations employ outside OD involves diagnosing the causes of poor practitioners. Government agencies, productivity in a work group. However, for example, generally have the client may expect the practitioner to procurement regulations that apply to complete the assignment without contracting with outside consultants. talking to the workers. Typically, clients  Regardless of the level of formality, all want to know how much time will be OD processes require some form of necessary to complete the assignment, 1ST TERM 2024-2025 PROF. TOMAS ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER 3: THE PROCESS OF ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT [ENTERING, CONTRACTING, DIAGNOSING] who needs to be involved, how much it to collect and analyze data to will cost, and so on. understand them, and how to work - Access to client, together to develop action steps from managers, members the diagnosis. - Access to information  In another sense, diagnosis is  Ground Rules and Confidentiality happening all the time. Managers, organization members, and OD practi- Emotional Demands of Entry tioners are always trying to understand The final part of the contracting process the drivers of organization involves specifying how the client and the effectiveness as well as how and why OD practitioner will work together. The changes are proceeding in a particular parameters established may include such way. issues as confidentiality, if and how the OD  Unfortunately, the term diagnosis can practitioner will become involved in be misleading when applied to personal or interpersonal issues, how to organizations. It suggests a model of terminate the relationship, and whether the organization change analogous to the practitioner is supposed to make expert medical model of diagnosis: An recommendations or help the manager organization (patient) experiencing make decisions. problems seeks help from an OD practitioner (doctor); the practitioner  Clients Issues: Exposed and examines the organization, finds the Vulnerable, inadequate, fear of causes of the problems, and prescribes losing control a solution.  OD Practitioner Issues: Empathy,  Diagnosis in organization worthiness and competency, development, however, is much more dependency, over-identification. collaborative than such a medical perspective implies and does not accept the implicit assumption that Diagnosing something is wrong with the organization. Diagnosis is the process of understanding a  The open-systems model recognizes system’s current functioning. It involves that organizations exist in the context of collecting pertinent information about existing a larger environment that affects how operations as well as analyzing those data and the organization performs, and, in turn, drawing conclusions about the reasons for is affected by how the organization current performance and the potential for interacts with it. change and improvement. Effective diagnosis  The model suggests that organizations provides the systematic know- ledge of the acquire specific inputs from the organization needed to design appropriate environment and transform them using interventions. Thus, OD interventions derive social and technical processes. The from diagnosis and include specific actions outputs of the transformation process intended to improve organizational functioning. are returned to the environment and What Is Diagnosis? information about the consequences of those outputs serve as feedback to the organization’s functioning.  Diagnosis is the process of  The open-systems model also understanding how the organization is suggests that organizations and their currently functioning, and it provides subsystems— groups and individual the information necessary to design jobs—share a number of common change interventions. It generally features that explain how they are follows from successful entry and organized and how they function. For contracting, which set the stage for example, open systems display a successful diagnosis. Those processes hierarchical ordering. help OD practitioners and client  Each higher level of system is members jointly determine which composed of lower-level systems: organizational issues to focus on, how Systems at the level of society are 1ST TERM 2024-2025 PROF. TOMAS ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER 3: THE PROCESS OF ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT [ENTERING, CONTRACTING, DIAGNOSING] comprised of organizations; organizations are comprised of groups; and groups are comprised of individual jobs. Diagnosis may be aimed through: 1. Uncovering the causes of specific problems. 2. Focused on understanding effective processes. 3. Directed at assessing the overall functioning of the organization or department to discover areas for future development. The following open-systems properties are described below: environments; inputs, transformations, and outputs; boundaries; feedback; and alignment. Inputs It shows that three key inputs or environmental types affect the way an organization is designed. The Open Systems Model provides a useful  Environmental Types Three classes of starting point for diagnosing organizations, environments influence how groups, and individual jobs. organizations function: the general environment, the task environment, It identified as the general framework that and the enacted environment. underlies most of the diagnosing in OD. The general environment consists of all It also recognizes that organizations exist in external forces that can directly or the context of a larger environment that indirectly affect an organization.9 The affects how the organization performs and is general environment can include a affected by how the organization interacts variety of social, techno-logical, with it. economic, ecological, and political/regulatory forces.  These forces may interact in unique and unpredictable ways, presenting the organization with challenging threats and opportunities. Each of the forces also can affect the organization in both direct and indirect ways. For example, an organization may have trouble obtaining raw materials from a supplier because a national union is grieving the supplier’s employment practices, a government regulator is bringing a lawsuit against the supplier, or a consumer group is boycotting the supplier’s products. Thus, parts of the 1ST TERM 2024-2025 PROF. TOMAS ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER 3: THE PROCESS OF ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT [ENTERING, CONTRACTING, DIAGNOSING] general environment can affect the organization without having any direct connection to it.  The task environment is another important organization input. Michael Porter defined an organization’s task environment in terms of industry structure represented by five forces: supplier power, buyer power, threats of substitutes, threats of entry, and rivalry among competitors. Design Components It shows that an organization’s design is composed of four components—technology, structure, management processes, and human resources systems.  It is surrounded by an inter- mediate input—strategy—and an intermediate output—culture—that need to be considered along with the organization’s design.  Effective organizations align their strategy to environ- mental inputs and then fit the design components to each other to support the strategy and to jointly promote strategic behaviors. Group-Level Diagnosis Work groups are prevalent in all types and sizes of organizations. They generally consist of a relatively small number of people working together on a shared task either face- to-face or virtually via electronic communication. Work groups can be relatively permanent and perform an ongoing function, or they can be temporary and exist only to per- form a certain task or to make a specific decision Individual-Level Diagnosis The final level of organizational diagnosis is the individual job or position. An organiza- tion consists of numerous groups; a group, in turn, is composed of several individual jobs. This section discusses the inputs, design components, and relational fits needed for diagnosing jobs. 1ST TERM 2024-2025 PROF. TOMAS