TRENDS WITHIN OD AND THEIR IMPACT ON

OD’S FUTURE
TRADITIONAL
•Return to original humanistic
values
•Increasing focus on process ORGANIZATIONAL
intervention DEVELOPMENT
will:
PRAGMATIC
•Emphasize values of •Have more conflict in
effectiveness
•Increasing focus on relevant
the short term
practice
•Be more integrated in
ACADEMIC the long term
•Emphasize values of
understanding, prediction, and
control
•Search for variable that explain
change and effectiveness
 Contextual trends and their effect
on OD’s Future
ECONOMY ORGANIZATIONAL
• More concerned with cultural
diversity
DEVELOMENT will be:
•More concentrated wealth
•More concerned ecologically •More embedded in
WORKFORCE
•Increasing diverse
the organization’s
•Increasingly educated operations
•Increasingly contingent •More technologically
enabled
TECHNOLOGY
• More E-commerce •Shorter OD cycle
• Faster organizational process times
• More productivity
•More interdisciplinary
•More diverse in client
ORGANIZATIONS
• More networked organization
• More Knowledge, learning, and •More cross –cultural
innovation based
•More concerned with
Traditional
The first trend has to do with increasing calls
for a return to OD’s traditional and others,
traditionalist argue that OD should be driven
by long –established values of human
potential, equality, trust, and collaboration. It is
proposed that OD should do what is right by
assuring that organizations promote positive
social change and corporate citizenship.
Pragmatic
related to increasing demands for
professionalization of the field and an emphasis
on relevance. Championed by change
management practices at large consulting firms
and some OD professional associations,
pragmatists argue that OD practitioners should be
certified like most other professionals. OD
should require certification of members, create a
common body of knowledge, define minimum
levels o f competencies, and institute other
regulatory infrastructure.
Scholarly
focuses on understanding, predicting an
controlling change. Unlike traditionalist and
pragmatist, scholars are concerned with
creating valid knowledge, and with
generalizing conclusions about how change
occurs, how it is triggered, under what
conditions it works well and so on.
Scholars proposed a research agenda w/c includes
• How multiple context and levels of analysis affect
organizational change
• The inclusion of time, history, process and action in
theories of change
• The link between change processes and organization
performance
• The comparative analysis of international and cross
cultural OD interventions
• The study of receptivity, customization, sequencing,
pace, and episodic versus continuous change processes
• The partnership between scholars and practitioners is
studying organizational change
 Implication of OD’s Future
OD will have more conflicts in the Short term
• Traditionalist fear that OD is becoming too
corporate and may unwittingly collude with
powerful stakeholders to promote goals
inconsistent with OD’s social responsibility
and humanistic values
• Pragmatist on the other hand worry that
relying too heavily too heavily on traditional
values will reinforce OD’s touchy feely
orientation.
 Implication of OD’s Future
OD will have more conflicts in the Short term
• The debate over values demonstrates how difficult it
will be to gain agreement about standards,
competencies, enforcement mechanisms, and
oversight.
 Implication of OD’s Future
OD will become more integrated in the long term
There is a considerable common ground among
the diverse trends within the OD, and the
emergence f a more integrated view of the field
seems likely in the long term.
The Economy
Increasing concern over social and ecological
consequences
Cultural diversity – Governments face the difficult choice of
preserving their culture ant the risk of being left out of the
global economy.
Income distribution – globalization of the economy is closely
related to an increasing concentration of wealth in relatively
few individuals, corporation and nations.
Ecological sustainability – there are increasingly clear warnings
that the ecosystem no longer can be treated as a factor of
production and that success cannot be defined as the
accumulation of wealth and material goods at the expense of
the environment.
The Workforce
The workforce is becoming more:
• Diverse – organizations, whether they operate
primarily in their home country or abroad, will need
to develop policies and operating styles that
embrace the changing cultural, ethnic, gender and
age diversity of the workforce.
• Educated – the workforce is becoming more
educated. A more educated workforce demands
higher wages, more involvement in decision making
and continued investment of knowledge and skills.
The workforce is becoming more:
• Contingent – the continued high rate of
downsizings, re-engineering efforts, and
mergers and acquisitions is forcing the
workforce to become more contingent and less
loyal.
Technology
Internet – the backbone of global economy.
E-commerce – an economy that knows no
boundaries. It involves buying and selling products
and services over the internet.
Two types of E-commerce relevant to OD’s Future
• Business-to-consumer – garners much attention and
awareness because it is how the public participates
in E-commerce.
• Business-to-business – more complex
Organization
involves increasingly networked and knowledge
based nature of organizations. The interventions
help organizations become more streamlined and
flexible, more capable of improving themselves
continuously in response to economic and other
trends and more effective.
Networks – are highly adaptable and can disband and
reform along different task or market lines as the
circumstances demand.
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OD will be more embedded in the
organization’s Operations
this suggest that OD practices will become more
embedded in the organization’s normal operating
routines. OD skills, knowledge, and
competencies can and should become the daily
work of managers and employees.
OD process will be more technologically
Enabled
Information technology is pervasive and will
have a significant affect on OD practice. First, it
will enable OD to be synchronous and
asynchronous (anytime, anywhere) as well as
virtual and less face to face. Second, information
technology will provide much more data about
the organization to a greater number of
participants in a shorter period of time.
OD Cycle Times will be Shorter
new information technologies will expedite
certain steps in the change process. In
coming years, new technologies such as
groupware and video conferencing, will
increasingly be used to bring more people
together faster than ever before. There is a
real potential to reduce dramatically the
time required to perform many OD
practices.
OD will be more Interdisciplinary
OD will continue to become more
interdisciplinary and rely on different
perspectives and approaches to develop
and change organizations. It will balance
human fulfillment and economic
performance, provide a fuller recognition
of the systemic and dynamic nature of
organizations and develop improved
techniques for managing large scale, and
change w/n and across natural cultures.
Concepts that can be used to describe systems change
and may yield new insights into the change process
• Emergence
• Instability
• Phase transitions
• Bifurcation
• self-organization
• Strange attractors
Concepts that are to be translated into frameworks
useful for OD practitioners
Small worlds Synchrony
Connectedness Cascades
Interaction Rules
OD will be Applied to More Diverse
Organizations
In the future planned change will be applied to a
more diverse client base.
Types of organizations that are target of planned
change
• Small entrepreneurial start-ups – important
underserved market for OD.
• Governments – increasingly applying OD
interventions such as strategic planning, employee
involvement, and performance management.
• Global Social Change Organizations – the
increasing concentration of wealth and globalization
of the economy will create a plethora of
opportunities for OD to assists developing countries,
disadvantage citizens and ecology.
OD will become More Cross-Cultural
As organizations and the economy become more
global, the recent growth of OD practice in
international and cross-cultural situations will
continue. The current trends of OD clearly point
to the need for OD applications that work across
cultures.
OD will Focus more on Ecological
Sustainability
Limits to the world’s ecosystem, including its
capacity to absorb population growth, function
with a depleted ozone layer, and operate with
polluted waters, provide serious challenges to the
traditional business model.
 New concepts, frameworks and philosophies that
Represents opportunities to make ecological
sustainability a more deliberate and intentional
value of organizational growth
• Coalition for Environmentally Responsible
Economics (CERES)
• Natural Capitalism – suggests that business
strategies build around the productive use of
natural resources can solve environmental
problems at a profit.
• Natural Step – proposes a set of guidelines for
development and a process of change that aligns
with an OD perspective. It utilizes four system
conditions
• Substances from within the earth must
not systematically increase in the
ecosphere
• Substances produced by society must not
systematically increase in the ecosphere
• The physical ability of nature to renew
itself must not be diminished
• The basic human needs of all people
need to be met with fairness and
efficiency