Organizational Development

Organizational Development (OD) has become more and more important for today’s organizations because the world is moving so fast that organizations have to find ways to be more effective, more innovation, more customer-driven, and more agile. Cumming and Worley (1997) define organizational development as “a process that applies a broad range of behavior science knowledge and practices to help organizations build their capacity to change and to achieve greater effectiveness” (p. 1). Therefore, OD will help organizations understand how people act to change and which change methods can work with the resistance to change that usually occurs in organizations undergoing change. As my concentration of SPS program is organizational development, it is important to study Organizational Intervention & Change Implementation in order to know how to operate and make use of change methods that seem to be vital in solving any problems that arise.

What I First Learned about the Course

In this course, I have learned that the change methods could be divided into four purposes: adaptable, planning, structuring, improving, and supportive (Holman, Devane, & Cady, 2007). In addition to the purpose, Holman, Devane, and Cady (2007) assert that individuals and organizations need to consider type of system, event size, duration, cycle, and practitioner preparation, and special resource needs. Since there are many methods to learn about, the paper of IIMT helped me to deeply understand methods that I thought they were interesting. I chose to study Appreciative Inquiry of adaptable methods, Scenario Thinking of planning methods, Participative Design Workshop of structuring methods, and The Six Sigma Approach of improving methods. In doing this assignment, ...

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... experiences and information related with the issues. This was my first time to involve in fishbowl conversation and I found that it was an simple, effective technique to build trust and mutual understanding and to improve the relationship among members.

Overall, the study of Organizational Intervention & Change Implementation through reading the book, attending the class, doing assignments such as IIMT and TIMPF, partaking in the process of organizational interventions, and having a fishbowl conversation help me to be very knowledgeable about change models, to effectively work in team, and to gain learning from classmates’ experiences and expertise. More importantly, I have gained ton of confidence in areas where I had little or no experience before. Now, I can have an ability to diagnose an organization’s problems and implement the appropriate change methods.