History of Organizational Development

History of OD

By Akil James

Organizational development is an ongoing, systematic process to implement effective change in an organization. Organizational development is known as both a field of applied behavioural science focused on understanding and managing organizational change and as a field of scientific study and inquiry. It is interdisciplinary in nature and draws on sociology, psychology, and theories of motivation, learning, and personality.

While today we can use this definition to explain the field of Organizational development, OD is a fairly new area of study that is in a constant paradoxical movement of evolution and revolution. French and Bell (1999) in their attempt to document the history of OD illustrated OD’s history true the analogy of a mangrove tree. This academic mangrove tree contains four major stems. One trunk stem consists of innovations in applying laboratory training insights to complex organizations. A second major stem is survey research and feedback methodology. Both stems are intertwined with a third, the emergence of action research. Cummings and Worley (2008) tie the stems of action research and survey feedback together, preferring to note that an important feature of action research was a technique known as survey feedback. A linking stem is a fourth stem- the emergence of the Tavistock socio technical and socio clinical approaches.

The first stem of OD pioneered labatory training, or the T group- a small unstructured group in which participants learn from their own interactions and evolving group processes about such issues such as interpersonal relations, personal growth, leadership and group dynamics. Essentially, laboratory training began in the summer of 1946, when Kurt Lewin and his staff at the Research Centre for Group Dynamics (RCGD) at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT) were asked by the Connecticut Interracial Commission and the Committee of Community Interrelations of the American Jewish Congress for help in research on training community leaders. Through a series of events at a New Britain workshop in 1946, what was later to be called the “T- group” began to emerge. The workshop staff consisted of Kurt Lewin, Kenneth Benne, Leland Bradford, and Ronald Lippitt. Each group in addition to group members and a leader, had an observer who made notes about interactions among members. At the end of each day, the observers met with the staff and reported what they had seen. At the second or third evening session, three members of the workshop asked if they could sit in on the reporting session, and were encouraged to do so. One woman disagreed with the observer about the meaning of her behaviour, and a lively discussion ensued. Thus, the first T-group was formed in which people reacted to data about their own behaviour (Kleiner, 1996). The researchers drew two conclusions about this first T-