OD practitioner as they almost always involve some degree of personal and organizational cultural change and often involve an OD practitioner or change agent to help facilitate this change. Today we see evidence of this trend in OD through the pervasive use of self-managed work teams that are given control and ownership of their work as well as how the team functions and is managed. We will discuss some of these programs in Chapters 11 and 12.
Up to this point in its history, OD focused on solving internal problems in the organization, centered on change first and foremost at the individual level. Seo, Putnam, and Bartunek (2004) contrast this phase, which they call first-generation OD, with second-generation OD, which they argue consisted of approaches that gave “explicit attention to the organizational environment and the organization’s alignment with it” (p. 85). Beginning in the 1980s, with an increasingly global and more frequently and rapidly changing environment, along with advances in technology, organizations were forced to more quickly adapt to new market conditions. As a result, OD interventions became more highly focused on systemwide concerns rather than on those of individuals. Seo et al. write that first-generation OD approaches assumed that changing the individual (through T-groups, survey feedback mechanisms, changing a manager’s assumptions or behaviors, or increasing employee involvement in teams) would gradually mushroom into change at a system level. They write that “in the turbulent environments of the 1980s and 1990s, however, individual and group development became less important to organizational effectiveness unless the organization as a whole continued to be attuned to its rapidly changing environment” (p. 86). Burnes and Cooke (2012) have noted that this period represented a shift from an academic focus on OD to a “practitioner OD” (p. 1405).
Even in the 1970s, some writers began to criticize the “soft” T-group model as the foundation for OD work, and OD became more focused on applications in business settings to further business objectives (Mirvis, 1988). With the challenges prompted by a new environment in the 1980s, second-generation OD approaches began to target changes at the level of the entire system. Increasingly, OD practitioners began to look externally at the organization’s connection to its environment and to conduct transformative change at the structural and system level. OD interventions became more oriented to strategic change with specific goals for the intervention, in contrast to earlier, open-ended interventions most evident in the T-groups of the 1940s and 1950s. This trend toward using OD efforts to result in strategic change and increased productivity became most evident in the popularization in the early 1980s in a tradition of work in organizational or corporate culture.
Profiles in Organization Development
Robert J. Marshak
Distinguished Scholar in Residence Emeritus, School of Public Affairs, American University, Washington, DC
Bob Marshak has been involved with OD through three different careers since 1974. Initially his intended career was in public service starting as a management analyst in a U.S. government scientific agency. Early on he incorporated OD principles into his work, and the success of those efforts led to rapid promotions into executive-level science policy positions. He left government service to start his own independent consulting practice in 1983. In addition to consulting on organizational strategy, structure, and change, he taught OD as an adjunct professor at American University where he had received his Ph.D. in public administration in 1977. In the 1990s, his intellectual curiosity led him to contribute writings to both academic and practitioner publications and was named “acting editor” of the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science in 2004. In 2006, he started his third career with his appointment as a full-time scholar in residence at American University and was named “emeritus” in 2017. Bob is known for his pioneering ideas about Dialogic OD; covert processes; and the use of metaphors in consulting and change. He is an award-winning author, educator, and consultant and has published three books and more than 100 articles and book chapters on consulting and change.
1 What kind of OD work do you do? (Please describe your research or practitioner area of interest). Do you have a certain specialization, style, or approach that is unique?I have always considered myself a theory-based consultant. By that, I mean my work has always been guided by explicit theories and concepts. In my early years, the concepts came from my graduate studies and attending NTL workshops. In later years, I developed my own conceptual explanations for what I was experiencing and contributed them to others through my own workshops and writings, for example, about such topics as covert processes in organizational change, organizational discourse, and Dialogic OD.
2 Why do you find it a compelling profession of research and/or practice? Why is OD relevant today?OD is based on a broad set of values such as democracy, humanism, inquiry, respect, and choice that have enduring import for collective experience. OD and its values may be challenged in favor of other values at different times but never lose importance and relevance.
3 What first drew you to the field of OD? How did you get started? Can you briefly describe an initial project, course, mentor, or event that you found compelling and led you to the profession?I started out as a management analyst charged with doing expert studies to improve organizational operations. Despite what was called “excellent work,” my recommendations sat on shelves and were not implemented. That frustrated me. At the same time I was learning about OD in my part-time graduate studies and began to introduce OD practices into my work to see if I could get better results. It worked, and I continued adding to what I did. The rest as they say is history.
4 Can you give an example of a recent OD project (research or practice) that you completed?My most recent and continuing work has been conceptualizing with my colleague Gervase Bushe the theory and practice of Dialogic OD. Separately and together we have conducted workshops and published articles, book chapters, and an edited book on the subject.The background to this is that in the 1990s my work with colleagues in the new academic field of organizational discourse studies expanded my thinking about organizational change to include ideas about social constructionism, the influence of storylines and metaphors on thinking and acting, the role of power and politics in determining preferred storylines and word images, and how transformational change required changes in the explicit and implicit metaphors and storylines guiding people’s thinking and acting.By the start of the new century, the combination of my own experiences and reflections on developments in OD theory and practice since the 1980s led me to conclude that a newer form of OD was emerging that did not fit the textbook descriptions of OD and importantly drew on more recent ideas from the interpretive and complexity sciences.Reflecting now on that formative period, I would say I was teaching myself a form of “Dialogic Process Consultation” where my dominant focus became how metaphors, storylines, and discursive processes shape individual and organizational realities and responses. I now find myself more interested in, and most effective, when I am drawing attention to and confronting deeply held conceptual metaphors or storylines that are implicitly framing experience. I also find that I am listening differently and raising alternative framings from the very first client contact. These early conversational “interventions” often serve to help reshape the direction of a consultation and may suggest where deeply held implicit beliefs are preventing innovation and new possibilities to emerge.
5 What do you think are the most important skills for a student of OD to develop?Conceptual skills in a wide range of topics; how to establish client-centered trusting relationships; clarity and succinctness in oral and written presentations and explanations; (psychological) contracting with clients; how to provide direct and supportive feedback; how to facilitate at least one OD intervention process; use of self; to name a few.
6 Many students say that OD is a difficult profession to “break in” to. What advice do you have for students wishing to get started in the field?OD in my experience has always been hard to break into mainly because there are no really entry-level jobs with most employers or clients wanting at least 3–5 years’ experience. What most people have done is start doing some OD projects or approaches
