The Organization Development Practitioner

Chapter 3

Submitted By
Zeeshan Sindhu

Submitted To
Dr. khawaja jehanzeb
ORGANIZATION DEVELOPMENT PRACTITIONER?
Throughout this text, the term organization development practitioner
refers to at least three sets of people. The most obvious group of OD
practitioners are those people specializing in OD as a profession. They
may be internal or external consultants who offer professional services
to organizations, including their top managers, functional department
heads, and staff groups. OD professionals traditionally have shared a
common set of humanistic values promoting open communications,
employee involvement, and personal growth and development. They
tend to have common training, skills, and experience in the social
processes of organizations (for example, group dynamics, decision
making, and communications). In recent years, OD professionals have
expanded those traditional values and skill sets to include more
concern for organizational effectiveness, competitiveness, and bottom-
line results, and greater attention to the technical, structural, and
strategic parts of organizations. That expansion, mainly in response to
the highly competitive demands facing modern organizations, has
resulted in a more diverse set of OD professionals geared to helping
organizations cope with those pressures.
COMPETENCIES OF AN EFFECTIVE ORGANIZATION

DEVELOPMENT PRACTITIONER
The literature about OD competencies reveals a mixture of personality
traits, experiences, knowledge, and skills presumed to lead to effective
practice. For example, research on the characteristics of successful
change practitioners yields the following list of attributes and abilities:
diagnostic ability, basic knowledge of behavioral science techniques,
empathy, knowledge of the theories and methods within the
consultant’s own discipline, goal-setting ability, problem-solving ability,
and ability to perform self- assessment, ability to see things objectively,
imagination, flexibility, honesty, consistency, and trust. Although these
qualities and skills are laudable, there has been relatively little
consensus about their importance to effective OD practice. Two
projects currently seek to define, categorize, and prioritize the skills and
knowledge required of OD practitioners. In the first effort, a broad and
growing list of well-known practitioners and researchers are asked to
review and update a list of professional competencies. The most recent
list has grown to 187 statements in nine areas of OD practice, including
entry, start-up, assessment and feedback, action planning, intervention,
evaluation, adoption, separation, and general competencies. The
statements range from “staying centered in the present, focusing on
the ongoing process” and “understanding and explaining how diversity
will affect the diagnosis of the culture” to “basing change on business
strategy and business needs” and “being comfortable with quantum
leaps, radical shifts, and paradigm changes.” Recent items added to the
list relate to international OD, large-group interventions, and
transorganization skills.
PROFESSIONAL ORGANIZATION DEVELOPMENT PRACTITIONER

Most of the literature about OD practitioners has focused on people

specializing in OD as a profession. In this section, we discuss the role
and typical career paths of OD professionals.

Role of Organization Development Professionals.

Position
Organization development professionals have positions that are either
internal or external to the organization. Internal consultants are
members of the organization and may be located in the human
resources department or report directly to a line manager. They may
perform the OD role exclusively, or they may combine it with other
tasks, such as compensation practices, training, or employee relations.
Many large organizations, such as Boeing, Raytheon, Disney, Microsoft,
Philip Morris, Procter & Gamble, Weyerhaeuser, Kimberly Clark,
and Citigroup, have created specialized OD consulting groups. These
internal consultants typically have a variety of clients within the
organization, serving both line and staff departments. External
consultants are not members of the client organization; they typically
work for a consulting firm, a university, or themselves. Organizations
generally hire external consultants to provide a particular expertise that
is unavailable internally, to bring a different and potentially more
objective perspective into the organization development process, or to
signal shifts in power.
Marginality

A promising line of research on the professional OD role centers on the

issue of marginality. The marginal person is one who successfully
straddles the boundary between two or more groups with differing
goals, value systems, and behavior patterns.
Emotional Demands
The OD practitioner role is emotionally demanding. Research and
practice support the importance of understanding emotions and their
impact on the practitioner’s effectiveness. The research on emotional
intelligence in organizations suggests a set of abilities that can aid OD
practitioners in conducting successful change efforts. Emotional
intelligence refers to the ability to recognize and express emotions
appropriately, to use emotions in thought and decisions, and to
regulate emotion in one’s self and in others. It is, therefore, a different
kind of intelligence from problem- solving ability, engineering aptitude,
or the knowledge of concepts.
Use of Knowledge and Experience
The professional OD role has been described in terms of a continuum
ranging from client centered (using the client’s knowledge and
experience) to consultant centered (using the consultant’s knowledge
and experience).
PROFESSIONAL VALUES
Values have played an important role in organization development
from its beginning. Traditionally, OD professionals have promoted a set
of values under a humanistic framework, including a concern for inquiry
and science, democracy, and being helpful. They have sought to build
trust and collaboration; to create an open, problem-solving climate;
and to increase the self-control of organization members. More
recently, OD practitioners have extended those humanistic values to
include a concern for improving organizational effectiveness (for
example, to increase productivity or to reduce turnover) and
performance (for example, to increase profitability).
PROFESSIONAL ETHICS
Ethical issues in OD are concerned with how practitioners perform their
helping relationship with organization members. Inherent in any
helping relationship is the potential for misconduct and client abuse.
OD practitioners can let personal values stand in the way of good
practice or use the power inherent in their professional role to abuse
(often unintentionally) organization members.
Ethical Guidelines
To its credit, the field of OD always has shown concern for the ethical
conduct of its practitioners. There have been several articles and
symposia about ethics in OD. In addition, statements of ethics
governing OD practice have been sponsored by the Organization
Development Institute of professional associations in OD. The
consortium has sponsored an ethical code derived from a large-scale
project conducted at the Center for the Study of Ethics in the
Professions at the Illinois Institute of Technology. The project’s
purposes included preparing critical incidents describing ethical
dilemmas and using that material for pre- professional and continuing
education in OD, providing an empirical basis for a statement of values
and ethics for OD professionals, and initiating a process for making the
ethics of OD practice explicit on a continuing basis.
Misrepresentation
Misrepresentation occurs when OD practitioners claim that an
intervention will produce results that are unreasonable for the change
program or the situation. The client can contribute to the problem by
portraying inaccurate goals and needs. In either case, one or both
parties are operating under false pretenses and an ethical dilemma
exists. For example, in an infamous case called “The Undercover
Change Agent,” an attempt was made to use sensitivity training in an
organization whose top management did not understand it and was not
ready for it.
Misuse of Data

Misuse of data occurs when information gathered during the OD

process is used punitively. Large amounts of information are invariably
obtained during the entry and diagnostic phases of OD. Although most
OD practitioners value openness and trust, it is important that they be
aware of how such data are going to be used. It is a human tendency to
use data to enhance a power position. Openness is one thing, but
leaking inappropriate information can be harmful to individuals and to
the organization. It is easy for a consultant, under the guise of obtaining
information, to gather data about whether a particular manager is good
or bad. When, how, or if this information can be used is an ethical
dilemma not easily resolved.
Coercion
Coercion occurs when organization members are forced to participate
in an OD intervention. People should have the freedom to choose
whether to participate in a change program if they are to gain self-
reliance to solve their own problems. In team building, for example,
team members should have the option of deciding not to become
involved in the intervention. Management should not decide
unilaterally that team building is good for members. However, freedom
to make a choice requires knowledge about OD. Many organization
members have little information about OD interventions, what they
involve, and the nature and consequences of becoming involved with
them. This makes it imperative for OD practitioners to educate clients
about interventions before choices are made for implementing them.
Value and Goal Conflict

This ethical conflict occurs when the purpose of the change effort is
not clear or when the client and the practitioner disagree over how to
achieve the goals. The important practical issue for OD consultants is
whether it is justifiable to withhold services unilaterally from an
organization that does not agree with their values or methods. OD
pioneer Gordon Lippitt suggested that the real question is the
following: Assuming that some kind of change is going to occur anyway,
doesn’t the consultant have a responsibility to try to guide the change
in the most constructive fashion possible? That question may be of
greater importance and relevance to an internal consultant or to a
consultant who already has an ongoing relationship with the client.