Organizational Development on OD Horizon (Research Paper Sample)

Merger of Organization Design and Organization Development:
A Qualitative study from the Perspectives of Change
Management and OD Horizon
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CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW
Organizational Learning
A learning organization is one that is structured to facilitate organizational learning. Organizational learning involves gathering and processing information usually within an infrastructure of information systems. According to LaMarsh (2005), companies must learn how to change, and education and training should become the foundation for a constantly learning environment, one that will support continuous change (p. 137). Learning organizations usually have strong organizational cultures as the shared beliefs and assumptions characterized by these strong cultures influence how members gather, process and share information. Finally, learning organizations depend heavily on effective leadership to create a vision for a successful learning environment and to lead members of the organization in that direction. In a study of smarter organizations, McGill and Slocum (2012) identified five core behaviors that facilitate organizational learning:
* Openness
* Systems thinking
* Creativity
* Personal efficacy
* Empathy
According to Stata (2009), "the rate at which organizations learn may become the only sustainable competitive, especially in the knowledge intensive industries" (p. 64). He suggested that the challenge is to find ways to accelerate organizational learning while building consensus for change and facilitating the change process. Inherent in the development of organizational learning, therefore, is the successful implementation of organizational change. Organizational learning is facilitated when there is an understanding of the changes occurring in the external environment and then adaptation of the beliefs and behavior within the organization to make them compatible with those changes (p. 67). These concepts are not new to OD, however, because, according to Hendry (1996), "the theory of organizational change grew out of organizational learning theories through the application of action research methodologies to organizational problems" (p. 622).
It is also possible to associate Kurt Lewin’s field theory of change—unfreezing, change, and refreezing—with some undercurrent of organizational learning. The learning occurring between the unlearning i.e. (unfreezing, when there is a motivation to change), and the learning that enables the organization to change then refreeze at the newly learned level. The validation of human capital, therefore, is not a new concept to OD. Since its inception, OD has been based on a set of values beliefs and assumptions that promote a humanistic framework. Beyond the capacity to learn, several OD and change management practitioners have come up with the concept of the organization being built to change or designed to learn. This concept has led to the examination of OD from the perspective of design.
Organization Design and Design Sciences
OD from a design perspective is not simply another attempt to integrate OD and come up with another intervention strategy. The concept of OD from the perspective of design science refers to a perspective that goes beyond integrating to a paradigm shift in the way organizations in the 21st century will need to be structured. Twenty first–century organizations will need to consider structural changes that are not confined to the physical, but rather changes that relate to how the organization is designed and developed. Lawler and Worley (2005) explored a related concept in their bestseller, entitled Built to Change, one that considers the idea of organizations as being built to change. Robbins (2005) suggested that organization design is concerned with constructing and changing the structure of the organization so that it could achieve its goals. Even earlier, Galbraith (2003) described organization design as a continuous decision process designed to bring about coherence among structure, strategy, and people within the organization.
Design History
It is not clear where the concept of organization design originated. Galbraith (2003) suggested that design is not new because every organization is designed. Simon (1996) claimed that everyone is engaged in design when they are working towards changing existing situations into what they want them to be. Churchman (2008) stated that design was derived from teleological or goal seeking behavior, and saw design as synonymous with actions that lead to the attainment of goals. Churchman also believed that knowledge inquiry is the essence of design, design in this context being thinking behavior that conceptually selects among a series of alternatives in order to figure out which objective leads to the desired goal or set of goals and to arrive at these sets of goals. Mohrman (2007) credited the earliest references to organization design as originating with the work of Herbert Simon, who believed that organizations were human designs because they were created by humans to achieve their goals and purposes. Based on Simon’s theories, the responses to change 21st-century organizations are currently experiencing and their continued inability to achieve organizational effectiveness, it is clear that for the most part the design elements of organizations have been overlooked (Simon, 1996). Romme (2003) also based his approach to design science on the work of Simon (1996). In his treatise, Romme stated that the idea of design "involves inquiry into systems that do not yet exist- either complete new systems or new states of existing systems" (p. 558). He further suggested that design is characterized by its emphasis on solution finding and proposes a framework for utilizing design sciences to design and develop organizations toward more humane, participative and productive futures.
Van Aken (2007) also credited the seminal work of Simon (1996) and Schön (1998) for the emergence of design sciences and agrees with Gresov and Drazin (2007) that design science owes much to systems thinking. He advocated that the design approach is a process that must be part of the repertoire of every OD practitioner. Indeed, the concept of equifinality, which was first defined by von Bertalanffy (2002) in his definition of systems theory, has also been utilized to define organizational design as it relates to the creation of organizations to achieve high performance. The essence of organization design, therefore, requires that in order to improve organizational performance and effectiveness, which is essentially realizing and achieving the goals of the organization as previously stated, there must be some emphasis on designing the organization initially to achieve these goals, or redesigning the organization to attain new goals that the organization may have set (Mohrman, 2007). According to Weick (2010), "proper organizational design could therefore make the difference between having an effective well-run organization and one having recurrent crises and organizational inefficiencies" (p. 369). Weick examined organization design as improvisation. He suggested that one of the ironies of organization design is that its effectiveness makes redesign and learning more difficult, and that continued effectiveness in a changing environment, therefore, requires continuous redesign (p. 376).
Current Practices
Bate, Khan, and Pye (2010) suggested the principle of culturally sensitive restructuring. They explored a relationship between culture and structure in order to put people back into organization design (p. 199) by bringing design and development together they believed it is possible to blend structure and culture into a single cultural form so as to initiate significant organizational change. They created a change intervention strategy that consisted of a four-phase change model that sought to reframe the culture-structure relationship, enabling the organization to move towards transformational change. In their study, Bate et al. (2010) proposed a "culturally sensitive approach to organization design by bringing hard and soft changes together, harnessing organization design and organization development in the service of fundamental corporate transformation" (p. 197). They highlighted the uniqueness of the approach with their acknowledgment that "very few studies have previously analyzed the complex relationship between organization structure and culture or sought to elaborate any sort of coherent methodology or process for bringing the two spheres together" (p. 198), and cited an earlier study by Anthony (2009) as one of the few exceptions. The work of van Aken (2007) veered away from the purely cultural aspect as it attempted to align business and human values in the organization. In an article, van Aken (2007) suggested that a design science approach to OD could result in new perspectives as to how OD interventions might bring about more effective organizational change.
CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY
This chapter delineates the research methods that were used in this study, the purpose of which was to understand, through interviews with practicing consultants, the current usage of organization development (OD) and organization design, and describe how their integration affect change intervention strategies in the turbulent 21st-century environment. According to Mohrman (2007), although the end vision is not yet fully described, the answers obtained via the exploration of the incorporation of OD and design, both theoretically and empirically, will advance both fields by suggesting badly needed solutions for organizations who must improve their performance and effectiveness while focusing on the value of its huma...