Organizational Development

The Nature of Organizational Change

Organizations introduce changes through people. Unless the people are willing to accept the need and responsibility for organizational change, intended changes can never be translated into reality. In addition, individuals have to learn to adapt their attitudes and behavioral patterns to constantly changing environments.

Management of change involves both individual and organizational change. Individual change is behavioral change, which is determined by individual characteristics of members such as their knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, needs, expectations and skills. It is possible to bring about a total change in an organization by changing behaviors of individual members through participative and educative strategies.… Read the rest

Abey Francis

Team Development Life Cycle

When a number of individuals begin to work at interdependent jobs, they often pass through several stages as they learn to work together as a team.  The stages of team development life cycle  are forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning.  This model of team development was first proposed by Bruce Tuckman in 1965, who maintained that these phases are all necessary and inevitable and allow team growth.

Though these are not followed rigidly, they do represent a broad pattern that may be observed and predicted in many settings across team’s time together. These stages are the result of a variety of questions and issues that team members face such as “who will be members of the team?”… Read the rest

Abey Francis

Process of Team Building

Team building attempts to improve effectiveness of the team by having team members to concentrate on:

  1. Setting goals and priorities for the team.
  2. Analyzing how team’s goals and priorities are linked to those of the organization.
  3. Analyzing how the work is performed.
  4. Analyzing how the team is working, and
  5. Analyzing the relationships among the members who are performing the job.

The process of team building is a collection of steps which lead to a specific change in the approach among people, to make effective teams.  Various steps of team building process are not one-shot action, rather, they are repetitive and cyclical.… Read the rest

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Survey Feedback as an Organizational Development Tool

The study of Survey Feedback played an important role in formation and history of Organizational Development (OD). Developed as an  organization wide intervention by Mann and his associates (1957-1965), survey feedback is a  process in which organizational members complete questionnaires on various organizational issues, receive feedback on the results, then take appropriate actions to address the critical needs and concerns.

Though some type of survey method was prevalent in various organizations earlier, Institute for Social Research (ISR) of University of Michigan, USA developed a comprehensive questionnaire for conducting survey in different aspects of an organization. The basic objectives of survey feedback method are as follows:

  1. To assist the organization in diagnosing its problems and developing action plan for problem-solving.
… Read the rest
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Domains of Learning

The term learning means changes in our behavior, attitude, knowledge and skills. In other wards we can say that through learning we can feel permanently changes in our self. If we are not feeling any changes in our above skills then it will not be called as learning. The learning is a type of reinforcement, which may learn a change in behavior enduring by strengthening and intensifying certain aspect of an individual behavior. Learning may be described at the process of acquiring the ability to respond adequately to a situation, which may or may not have been previously an countered.… Read the rest

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Action Research in Organizational Development

Action research is another view of the organizational change process. It is an organizational change process that is based on a research model specifically one that contributes towards the betterment of the sponsoring organization and contributes to the advancement of knowledge of organizations in general. In Action Research, the change agent is usually an outside person, who is involved in the total change process, from diagnosis to evaluation. This person usually contracts with the sponsoring organization to engage in organizational research, whereas the typical change agent is called in to make a specific change. Action Research  in organizational development provides a scientific methodology for managing planned change.… Read the rest

Abey Francis