Organizational Development Interventions

ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT (OD) INTERVENTIONS

“Intervention is any event, directed toward improving organizational effectiveness, that disrupts an organization’s normal way of operating.”

-- Organizational Development: Strategies for Changing Environment

Organizational development interventions are techniques and methods created by OD professionals after diagnosing an organizational situation and providing feedback to management, to address an organizational problem or a positive future. A single organization cannot use all the interventions, and may only use them depending on the need.

Who intervenes? Sometimes, CONSULTANTS (OD practitioners), many times MANAGEMENT

For a successful OD intervention, the intervention must:

1. Be communicated more openly
2. Be collaborated more effectively
3. taken more responsibly
4. maintain a shared vision
5. solve problems more efficiently
6. show more respect and support for others
7. interact with each other more effectively
8. be more inquisitive
9. be more open to experimentation and new ways of doing things

The following are the most important/ common OD interventions:

1. Survey Feedback (intergroup)

• Provides data and information to managers
• Results on employee attitude, wage level, structure, working hours, working conditions
• Analyze data → find problem → evaluate results → develop solution

1. Process Consultation

• Process consultants meet members and observe interaction, etc. → feeds info to a team → coaches and counsels individuals and groups in molding behavior

1. Goal Setting and Planning

• Identify new opportunities for the team, get creative, think out of the box, imagine
• Goals: send to top management → send it back to division after revision
• Top management synergizes all goals, where an organizational goal eventually emerges

1. Sensitivity Training

• Laboratory → conducted by creating an experimental laboratory situation in which employees are brought together

1. The Managerial Grid

• Aka Instrumental Laboratory Training because it identifies a range of management behaviors by using individual and group exercises, with a view of developing management style, interpersonal competence, and group effectiveness
• Six steps

• Studying the grid as a theoretical knowledge to understand the human behavior in the organization
• Team work and development (eg. Seminar)
• Inter group development
• Strategic model of the organization where top management also participates
• Implementation of strategic model
• Critical evaluation and make necessary adjustments

1. Team Building or Bonding

• Application of various techniques to actual work groups in various departments.
• Consists of peers and a supervisor
• Due to: a merger, restructure, new team or project team, new members, new leader, conflict, people from different departments or areas working together, low morale, performance improvement to achieve a new target
• Appropriate OD interventions include

• Basic team building: get to know each other
• Build common values
• Craft a vision for the team
• Improve team performance of existing teams

1. Job Enrichment

• Assumption: to motivate workers
• Job itself must provide opportunities for achievement, recognition, responsibility, advancement and growth
• Idea is to restore job elements which were taken away

1. Create new paradigms

• Often challenges existing paradigms: identify new opportunities for the team, develop new ways of doing things, imagine, get creative, think out of the box
• OD interventions include

• Provide research about new strategic trends
• Brainstorming sessions
• Using team members’ strengths in a different way
• Creative team based strategic planning workshop

1. Strategic Planning

• OD interventions include

• Team-based strategic planning
• Develop a scenario for the future which your team needs to operate
• Define new role or vision for your team
• Identify new opportunities
• Develop new strategies
• Define each person’s role in implementing team strategies

1. Communicating your vision. Getting in and buy action.

• Communicate: face to face, virtual communication (videos, newsletters, websites…)
• Getting in and buy action: workshops which combine communications, competitions with incentives

1. Planning Change

• When there is too much change, developing integrated change management strategy together with team

1. Energy

• When organization lacks energy → solve team problems, deal with morale