Organization Development - Overview

Overview

The purpose of OD is to address perennial evolving needs of successful organizations - a concerted collaboration of internal and external experts in the field to discover the process an organization can use to become more stakeholder effective.

OD is a lifelong, built-in mechanism to improve immunity of organization's health to renew itself inclusive principles, often with the assistance of a change agent or catalyst and the use of enabling appropriate theories and techniques from applied behavioral sciences, anthropology, sociology, and phenomenology. Although behavioral science has provided the basic foundation for the study and practice of OD, new and emerging fields of study have made their presence felt. Experts in systems thinking and organizational learning, mind maps, body mind synchronicity, structure of intuition in decision making, and coaching (to name a few) whose perspective is not steeped in just the behavioral sciences, but a much more multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary approach have emerged as OD catalysts. These emergent expert perspectives see the organization as the holistic interplay of a number of systems that impact the process and outputs of the entire organization. More importantly, the term change agent or catalyst is synonymous with the notion of a leader who is engaged in leadership - a transformative or effectiveness process - as opposed to management, a more incremental or efficiency based change methodology.

Organization development is an ongoing, systematic process of implementing effective organizational change. Organization development is known as both a field of applied behavioral science focused on understanding and managing organizational change and as a field of scientific study and inquiry. It is interdisciplinary in nature and draws on sociology, psychology, and theories of motivation, learning, and personality. Organization development is a growing field that is responsive to many new approaches including Positive Adult Development.