Organizational Development (OD)

Interventions
Organizational Development (OD) Interventions are structured program
designed to solve a problem, thus enabling an organization to achieve the goal. These
intervention activities are designed to improve the organization’s functioning and enable
managers and leaders to better manage their team and organization cultures. These OD
interventions are required to address the issues that an organization might be facing ranging from
process, performance, knowledge, skill, will, technology, appraisal, career development,
attrition, top talent retention and the list can actually be pretty exhaustive.

There are 3 types of interventions that an organization should be able to identify and plan to
implement.

1. Individual : Interventions pertaining to an individual.

2. Group : Interventions pertaining to a group.

3. Organization : Interventions related to the organization’s strategy and policy.

An organization should be able to identify the kind of OD intervention required. Once the
intervention is identified the organization should then plan to address or eradicate the issue at
hand in an effective manner. Below mentioned are the OD intervention process that an
organization should have to address any intervention.

1. Entering and Contracting : Here we establish the fact that yes we do require OD
intervention to address an issue.

2. Diagnosis : In this process we identify the intervention and establish the root cause of
the issue.

3. Designing Intervention : In this process we design the approach to address the issue
or intervene to sort the issue out and bring value to business.

4. Leading and Managing Change : Here we establish a focus group with

management buy in and implement the designed intervention. OD intervention is a structured
programme driven from top to bottom.

5. Evaluating and Institutionalizing Interventions: Here we evaluate the

course of actions implemented and see if we are on track or if we need to re-design the approach
so that the objective if met.
There are 4 buckets in which the OD intervention process can be bundled together.

1. Human Process : Human process related activities are tagged under this group viz.
a. Job Analysis.

b. Team Building Activities.

2. Strategic : Activities related to organizational strategies and policies are grouped under
this bucket.

3. Human Resource Management : Human resource related activities are grouped

under this bucket viz.

a. Reward and Recognition.

b. Appraisal.

c. Career Development.

4. Technostructural : Activities related to technology or where technology is related are

tagged under this bucket.

Conclusion : These are some of the aspects of Organizational Development Interventions and
the effective mechanism to identify and address the issues at hand. These interventions are
unavoidable in totality, however a vigilant and matured organization should be able to apprehend
the issue much before it erupts off on bigger scale and should be able to address at the very
initial stage when it can be done with minimum efforts. The cost of negligence can have adverse
impact in terms of cost, wide spread agitation resulting in to image, reputation, and delivery and
branding loss.