“I’ll show you an example of one of the ways that he is always slighting us or getting a dig in,” Nadia said as she pulled up an e-mail on her computer. “Just a week ago I finished conducting a supplier review that was a real headache to pull off and somehow Jared found out about it. He sent this e-mail on Monday and copied everyone on our team. It’s short, so I’ll read it to you. ‘Everyone, Nadia has finally completed a supplier review and did an excellent job in uncovering major errors. This is why I insist on accurate metrics.’ Who would send a message like that? First, what does he mean by ‘finally completed’? Is he saying it took me too long or something? And then he adds his point about metrics, which is a clear insult to me because he mentioned one of my errors in a staff meeting last month. He didn’t mention my name then, but I’m sure everyone knows. These kinds of comments are really demoralizing. You can’t trust anything he says.”
Back in Tom’s Office
“So that’s about it,” Paul concluded.
“I had a feeling some of this was going on from my conversations with employees,” Tom admitted. “But you’ve found some surprising details. Now the question is, any ideas about what to do next?”
Chapter Two History of Organization Development
If you have just heard the term organization development (OD) used recently, you may be surprised to learn that the practice of OD is now entering into its eighth decade (even though the term itself first began to be used in the 1960s; see Sashkin & Burke, 1987). Like the business and organizational environments where it is practiced, OD has grown and changed significantly during this time. This chapter highlights different strands of research and practice to illustrate how each of these traditions of OD can be seen, explicitly and implicitly, in how it is practiced today. Nine major traditions of OD research and practice are described here, though these blend together and intersect one another, and the themes in these nine traditions can be seen throughout later chapters. These trends follow one another more or less historically, though there is significant overlap and influence among each of them.
By becoming aware of the history of OD, you will be more aware of how it has been defined throughout its life, as well as the changes that the field has undergone from its historical roots. In addition, you will better understand how today’s practice of OD has undergone many years of research and practice to reach its current state.
The nine strands of OD research and practice discussed in this chapter are as follows:
1 Laboratory training and T-groups
2 Action research, survey feedback, and sociotechnical systems
3 Management practices
4 Quality and employee involvement
5 Organizational culture
6 Change management, strategic change, and reengineering
7 Organizational learning
8 Organizational effectiveness and employee engagement
9 Agility and collaboration
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Laboratory Training and T-Groups
By most accounts, what has come to be known as organization development can be traced back to a training laboratory effort that began in 1946–1947 in Bethel, Maine, at what was then known as the National Training Laboratory (NTL) in Group Development. The laboratory’s founders, Kenneth Benne, Leland Bradford, and Ronald Lippitt, were inspired to develop NTL by the dedicated work of a fourth scholar and their predecessor, Kurt Lewin. A German immigrant who had arrived in the United States in the early 1930s to escape the sociopolitical environment of his home country, Lewin was a social psychologist on the faculty at the University of Iowa. His interest was in studying patterns of group behavior, social problems, and the influence of leadership on a group. At its core, Lewin’s work was an effort to understand and create personal and social change, with the objective of building and growing democracy in society (see Benne, 1964; L. P. Bradford, 1974; Hirsch, 1987; Kleiner, 1996).
In the 1940s, with his graduate student, Ron Lippitt, Lewin studied boys’ clubs, specifically boys’ reactions to different styles adopted by group leaders. Spurred on by the implications of these results, in 1945 Lewin established a Research Center for Group Dynamics (a phrase Lewin invented; see L. P. Bradford, 1974) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
In the summer of 1946, a significant and unexpected finding occurred that dramatically changed the research and practitioner landscape at the time. It was at this time that the practices that became the T-group were discovered by Lewin and his students. The Connecticut Interracial Commission had asked Kurt Lewin to develop a workshop for community leaders in association with the Commission on Community Interrelations of the American Jewish Congress. The objective of the workshop was to assist community leaders in developing solutions to problems that they faced in their communities, specifically addressing problems in the implementation of the Fair Employment Practices Act. Participants included not only community leaders but also businesspeople, social workers, teachers, and other interested citizens. Instead of making attendees passively sit through lengthy lectures, speeches, and presentations by experts, which many of them had been expecting, organizers developed a workshop in which participatory group discussion, role playing, and teamwork would be the primary activities (Hirsch, 1987). Group leaders debated whether subgroups should be homogeneous (e.g., all teachers, all social workers) or mixed (Lippitt, 1949). These two considerations (group participation and composition) continue as key questions for the OD practitioner today.
For the researchers at the Research Center for Group Dynamics, it was an unusual opportunity to observe group processes and to understand how participants learned from their experiences in order to develop new skills that they could use when they returned to their communities. In addition, the workshop fit with the values that the researchers had espoused at the time. Kenneth Benne would later say,
I saw it was an effort to help volunteers from various parts of Connecticut to begin to see themselves as agents of change in their responsible roles as citizens. . . . It seemed to me that this was research designed to serve both the purposes of social action and the purposes of more refined and powerful methods of training people for action. (quoted in L. P. Bradford, 1974, p. 19)
As a workshop designed for both social change and social research, each subgroup had a researcher assigned to it for note-taking and observation purposes.
Each evening, following the discussion session, the researchers convened to discuss the day’s events to document observations, code interaction, and interpret group behavior. A few of the participants in the day workshops learned of these researcher meetings and asked if they could sit in and observe. The researchers agreed and opened the sessions to other participants who were free to attend if they wished.1 The researchers continued their process of reflecting on and interpreting the participants’ actions during the day while the participants listened. At one point, one of the researchers stated that he had seen one woman, who had been a cautious and quiet participant earlier, become a more lively contributor that day as a result of being assigned to a leadership role during a role-playing activity. Rather than allowing this observation to pass without comment, the researchers invited the woman (who was present at that evening’s discussion, listening to the observation being shared) to discuss the hypothesis and to share her own interpretation. The woman agreed that, yes, it had been more enjoyable to participate as a result of being assigned to the leadership role. She found herself surprised by how much she was energized by the discussion and how much she changed from initially being uncomfortable