Assessments

As this course concludes, reflect on all you have learned. The readings, Discussions, Assignments, and assessments should have increased your base of knowledge and appreciation of key elements of the field. Comments and dialogue with your peers should have provided valuable insight and helped you further deepen and broaden your understanding of consulting for organizational development and change.

Now turn your thoughts to the future and consider how you will apply what you have learned in order to be an effective practitioner and create positive social change. What career opportunities are most interesting to you? How will you continue to develop your professional skills? As you revisit and reflect on the assessments you completed in Week 1, do you think your results would be different today? Has your learning in this course helped you meet your personal goals and objectives based on these assessments?

Post a response to the following:

Identify the top three to five most important takeaways from this course.

Are your perceptions of the field any different than they were in the first week? If so, how?

What professional development activities will you pursue in the next 6 months?

Identify one or two key takeaways from the assessments (Strengths Finder and EIQ-16R) you completed in Week 1. In particular address the following two questions:

How has your learning and growth during this course helped you improve and/or reinforce the assessed skills?

How can these assessments, and similar ones, be used by OD consultants to benefit individuals and organizations with which they work? Here is the information

There are a number of professional domains that aim at enhancing organizational performance but they do so in a different perspective. “Industrial/Organizational (I/O) psychology” focuses on scientific research of human behavior in the workplace, and it is based on measurement, evaluation, and evidence-based interventions that maximize the effectiveness of individuals and teams (APA, 2022). This is also of interest to “organizational psychology” which tends to be more focused on attitudes, motivation and well-being at the workplace. “Consulting psychology” involves the use of psychological principles in very broad organizational issues, such as in leadership coaching, assessment, and conflict resolution.

These areas overlap with the concept of organizational development (OD), but it has a more systemic view (Burke, 2018). Close neighbours include “organizational development and psychology” (OPD), which incorporates psychological understanding with OD concepts; in the field of organizational design, “organizational design,” which focuses on structural alignment; “management consulting,” which frequently deals with strategy, operations, and financial analysis; and in the field of “change management,” which provides methods of leading planned change, usually within a specific project or initiative. In practice, these disciplines tend to interrelate, but the purposes and approaches are different.

What Organizational Development Is

Organizational development is a long-term initiative aimed at enhancing the capability and health of an organization by interventions based on behavioral science. It is humanistic and systemic in approach as it aims at making relationships, culture, processes, and structures stronger in order to enable the organization to adapt and evolve. OD presupposes that the participation, collaboration, and inquiry lead to the meaningful improvement (Basadur et al., 2012). Its approaches usually involve action research, group facilitation, team development, cultural assessment and interventions to enhance communication or decision-making. One characteristic of OD is that it focuses on organizational learning. Instead of providing a pre-determined solution, OD practitioners assist the organization in diagnosing its issues, experimenting, and developing capacity to cope with the change in the future. This developmental orientation is identified by Burke (2018) when analyzing the history of OD, he mentions that OD has been seeking to align human values with organizational performance.

What Organizational Development Is Not

OD should not be confused with expert-based consulting which provides predetermined recommendations. OD practitioners can offer guidance but this is largely facilitative and not prescriptive. OD is not even equal to change management. Change management usually functions within the confines of a single project; OD, in turn, is concerned with long-term growth and flexibility on the system-wide level. Neither is OD a set of workshops or team building activities. Although these activities can be involved in an OD effort, they only work when placed in a more systemic intervention.

Examples and Distinguishing Features

Some of the examples of OD practice are whole-system strategic planning sessions, organization-wide cultural interventions, team-building based on assessment data