Organizational Development Practitioners

Organizational Development Practitioners are people who are entrusted with the job to carry out the
planned change process in the organization. These are the people with the ultimate responsibility to
development and create organizational wide effectiveness through challenging and changing its current
practices. OD Practitioner normally refers to people who do Organizational Development. These are the
people who support in favor of the change initiative and assist others to implement Organizational
Development interventions. Normally the Organizational Development Practitioners are either the OD
Specialist or Leaders and Managers who bring change in their work domain.

OD Specialists

These are people who a specialist in the field of Organizational Development

Normally Referred to as OD Consultants

Can be Both Internal and External

OD Practitioner may be from HR department or Separate OD groups may exist in the organization

Leader or Managers

Leaders and Managers may apply OD techniques to their domain of work and work as OD Practitioners,
it is important as this would help highlight the need and importance of the change initiative, and aid in
lessen the resistance to Change. Organizational Development Practitioners may be Internal or External,
Both have its advantages and disadvantages.

Types of Organizational Development Practitioners

1. External OD Practitioners

Advantages

Brought in from outside so not associated with the system, which makes them less dependent on the
system and makes them work independently
They are more formal in their approach and since they are Specialist they are more Involved in the
process, as this is what they to for living

Sees from Different point of view, with Objectivity

Greater freedom of operation

Viewed by top managers to have more positive influence, as they cannot be influenced with ease, and
are not really a part of the organizational structure

Less Influenced by power politics of the organization

More Independent and Risk Takers

Disadvantages

Outsiders are unfamiliar with the organizational culture, Norms, Practices

May have difficulty in Obtaining the information due to lack of information on data repository and
informal channels of communication

2. Internal Practitioners

Advantages

Familiar with Organizational culture and norms

They know the Structure of the Organization

They know the people

Have personal interest in making organization succeed

Disadvantages

Lack of Specialized Skills

Lack of Objectivity as they may be influenced by the Management

May not have necessary power and authority

Change Agent
Though change is a continuous process involving managers at all levels, who should initiate
change and how has to be deliberately decided in planned change. Planned change can be
introduced through change agents. Change agent is the person who initiates change in the
organization to increase organizational effectiveness.

Planned change may be change in people, structure or technology. Any resistance in introducing
change is overcome by the change agent who motivates the employees to accept the change.
Internal management takes help of external consultants in introducing planned change

Change agents can, thus, be:

1. External Change Agents and

2. Internal Change Agents.

1. External change agents:

They are generally the behavioral scientists who specialize in human behavior. They work as consultants
for the company and devise its change strategy.

A change agent can be a lower tier worker with the right mix of skills, characteristics and authority to
shepherd others through the transformation. Achange agent can also be someone outside the
organization; an external change agent is often a consultant hired to help with a change effort.

2. Internal change agents:

They are continuously involved in the change process. Internal change agents are usually the managers
who are trained by the consultants (external change agents) to implement change as on ongoing
process.

They introduce change within the broad framework of change strategy devised by the external change
agents.

They also lead the members to implement the change process. Internal change agents may also be
change advisors appointed from specific departments for specific periods. After the change programme
is completed, they go to their original departments.

They convince organizational members to accept and implement the change. What they learn from the
consultants, they communicate to the managers and promote behavioral skills to smoothen the change
process.

Change advisors should have the following qualities for making change programme
successful:

1. Diagnostic skills.

2. Behavioural skill.
3. Attitudes of acceptance.

4. Personal qualities to provide emotional support and reassurance. — Watton

External Change Agents:

1. They take total view of the organization as a system.

2. They are not much affected by norms of the organization.

3. They do not view change as an on-going process as they are appointed by the organization for specific
tasks.

4. They use diagnostic skills to diagnose the problem and plan the overall strategy for change.

5. Their role is comprehensive in nature.

6. Their role is primarily that of process consultation, that is, deciding the process of introducing change.

7. They help the organisation move towards self-renewal and growth

Internal Change Agents:

1. They accept the system as given

2. They apply change practices suitable to the needs of the organization within the organizational
norms.

3. They view change as an on-going process with minor or major changes in the components of the
organization

4. They use problem-solving skills to deal with problems related to change.

5. Their role is secondary to that of external agents.

6. Their role is primarily of implementing the change process. They work as trained by the consultants.
Their role is primarily educational as they educate people about the need for accepting and
implementing the change.

7. They sustain the organization to maintain their competitive position.

Though, external and internal change agents have different roles, the difference is only in the
perspective. Their focus is the same; to move the organization to a new state of equilibrium with better
competitive advantage.

While external change agents are specialised in their work, internal change agents work under their
guidance to deal with people internal to the organisation and implement the change process smoothly
with no or minimum resistance.
Change process is effective when external change agent acts as a process consultant and actual
implementation is done by the internal change agents. Internal change agent is more conversant with
the problems in the organization and can, therefore, manage the change process better. Various
diagnostic and problem-solving skills can, however, be taught by the external change agent.

Future shock and change

Technology is both hero and villain of “Future Shock,” a new book by Alvin Toffler
that has stirred interest in the publishing world even before it has reached the
bookstores.

The publishers attribute the interest to the public concern that technology has
contributed to a polluted, overpopulated world and has shaken man's traditional
values, leaving nothing to replace them.

Mr. Toffler is a lanky, 41‐ year‐old former editor of Fortune magazine. He has taught
the “sociology of the future” at the New School for Social Research here. As a
visiting professor at Cornell University he conducted research on the functioning of
societies.

“What joins all these is the roaring current of change, current so powerful that it wert
urns institutions, shifts our values and shrivels our roots,” he said.

“the shat tering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting
them to too much change in too short a time.

Mr. Toffler believes that rapid job mobility contributes to the fracturing of families
and the weakening of human relations in general. “The shorten ing duration of our
ties,” he says, “Has a hidden, powerful impact on the emotional quality of those ties.”

“What is needed to cope with high‐speed change, he went on, is a “strategy of social
futurism,” leaning heavily on the experience of anthropology and sociology in
adapting developing societies to the shock of industrialism. These “future shock
absorbers” would range from groups of scholars work ing with government agencies
and corporations to transition counseling and the design of computerized “love
networks” to further community cooper ation.

He said he saw a hopeful sign of how technology can be used to “extend man's range
of freedom” by the emerging changes in production methods and corporate
organizations.

Thanks to the new tech nology, he said, producers no longer require human beings to
do routine work but can allow room for individual taste as implied in the automobile
sale slogan “the car you design yourself.”

“Take an individual out of his own culture and set him down suddenly in an
environment sharply different from his own, with a different set of cues to react to—
 different conceptions of time, space, work, love, religion, sex, and everything else —
then cut him off from any hope of retreat to a more familiar social landscape, and the
dislocation he suffers is doubly severe. Moreover, if this new culture is itself in
constant turmoil, and if—worse yet— its values are incessantly changing, the sense
of disorientation will be still further intensified. Given few clues as to what kind of
behavior is rational under the radically new circumstances, the victim may well
become a hazard to himself and others.

“Now imagine not merely an individual but an entire so city an entire generation—
including its weakest, least intelligent, and al members—suddenly transported into
this new world. The result is mass disorientation, future shock on a grand scale.

“This is the prospect that man now faces. Change is avalanching upon our heads and
most people are grotesquely unprepared to cope with it.”

in “Future Shock.”

“I know a lot of people think culture is a mushy, fuzzy concept,” says Norm Sabapathy,
executive vice president of people at Cadillac Fairview Corp., an owner and operator of
commercial real estate in Toronto. “But, increasingly, research is showing that people really do
care about culture.”

Culture is considered a potential competitive advantage by 82 percent of more than 7,000 CEOs
and HR leaders from 130 countries, according to the Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends
2016 report. Yet only 28 percent of the Deloitte survey respondents believe they understand their
culture well, and only 19 percent believe they have the “right culture.”

To help, provides 10 tips for driving a culture change:

1. Define desired values and behaviors. Do people understand them and how they relate to
day-to-day behavior? Come up with behavioral descriptors for each value you define and
articulate how those would translate into actionable behaviors at all levels—from secretaries
to middle managers to executives, Sabapathy advises.

2. Align culture with strategy and processes. Do your mission, vision and values line up with
your HR processes, including hiring, performance management, compensation, benefits and
the promotion of talent?

3. Connect culture and accountability. It is easy, particularly in difficult times, to forget the
values you set in place to define your company, he says, citing Enron and WorldCom as
examples. However, companies have a better chance at weathering disaster if they take
responsibility for their actions, Sabapathy says.

4. Have visible proponents. For culture change to stick, it must be a priority of the CEO and
board of directors. “Show the board a framework for understanding organizational culture
and its impact on performance,” Sabapathy says. Work with the board to create a standing
 performance objective for the CEO that evaluates culture.

5. Define the non-negotiables. When contemplating a culture change, look at your current
culture and call out which aspects you want to retain. Determining what’s not up for debate is
particularly important during mergers and acquisitions, when leaders of two or more
organizations must figure out how to blend identities.

6. Align your culture with your brand. Culture must resonate with both employees and the
marketplace. To accomplish this, HR increasingly is partnering with marketing, he says. This
is especially relevant in our current online world, where today’s bad customer experience can
become tomorrow’s viral sensation.

7. Measure your efforts. Help demonstrate the effectiveness of your efforts by implementing
employee surveys and analyzing gaps between desired and actual behavior.

8. Don’t rush it. Changing a culture can take anywhere from months to several years. Start by
making sure there’s a clear rationale for why the company should change, he advises.

9. Invest now. Don’t wait for staff and resources that may never come. “It takes years of
investment to get to that point where [your culture] just automatically becomes part of how
you behave and act,” so begin whatever way you can.

10. Be bold and lead. You don’t have to be in a position of influence to have influence. “When
we step up, it encourages others to step up as well,” he says.

Corporate Culture

What is Corporate Culture?

Corporate culture refers to the beliefs and behaviors that determine how a company's employees
and management interact and handle outside business transactions. Often, corporate culture is
implied, not expressly defined, and develops organically over time from the cumulative traits of
the people the company hires. A company's culture will be reflected in its dress code, business
hours, office setup, employee benefits, turnover, hiring decisions, and treatment of clients, client
satisfaction and every other aspect of operations.

Corporate Culture

BREAKING DOWN Corporate Culture

Alphabet (GOOGL), the parent of Google, is well known for its employee-friendly corporate
culture. It explicitly defines itself as unconventional and offers perks such as
telecommuting, flextime, tuition reimbursement, free employee lunches and on-site doctors. At
its corporate headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., the company offers on-site services such as
oil changes, massages, fitness classes, car washes and a hair stylist. Its corporate culture helped it
to consistently earn a high ranking on Fortune magazine's list of 100 Best Companies to Work
For.

History of Corporate Culture

. The term corporate culture developed in the early 1980s and became widely known by the
1990s. Corporate culture was used during those periods by managers, sociologists and other
academics to describe the character of a company. This included generalized beliefs and
behaviors, company-wide value systems, management strategies, employee communication and
relations, work environment and attitude. Corporate culture would go on to include company
origin myths via charismatic CEOs, as well as visual symbols such as logos and trademarks.

By 2015, corporate culture was not only created by the founders, management and employees of
a company, but also influenced by national cultures and traditions, economic trends, international
trade, company size and products.

There are a variety of terms that relate to companies affected by multiple cultures, especially in
the wake of globalization and the increased international interaction of today's business
environment. As such, the term cross culture refers to “the interaction of people from different
backgrounds in the business world”; culture shock refers to the confusion or anxiety people
experience when conducting business in a society other than their own; and reverse culture shock
is often experienced by people who spend lengthy times abroad for business and have difficulty
readjusting upon their return.