Explain Organizational Development process

Organization Development (OD) is a planned approach to improve employee and organizational effectiveness by conscious interventions in those processes and structures that have an immediate bearing on the human aspect of the organization.

A normal OD process can be phased in following manner:

Problem identification: The first step in OD process involves understanding and identification of the existing and potential problems in the organization. The awareness of the problem includes knowledge of the possible organizational problems of growth, human satisfaction, the usage of human resource and organizational effectiveness.

Data Collection: Having understood the exact problem in this phase, the relevant data is collected through personal interviews, observations and questionnaires.

Diagnosis: OD efforts begin with diagnosis of the current situation. Usually, it is not limited to a single problem. Rather a number of factors like attitudes, assumption, available resources and management practice are taken into account in this phase. There are four steps in organizational diagnosis:

• Structural analysis: Determines how the different parts of the organization are functioning in terms of laid down goals.
• Process analysis: Process implies the manner in which events take place in a sequence. It refers to pattern of decision making, communication, group dynamics and conflict management patterns within organization to help in the process of attainment of organizational goals.
• Function analysis: This includes strategic variables, performance variables, results, achievements and final outcomes.
• Domain analysis: Domain refers to the area of the organization for organizational diagnosis.

Planning and implementation: After diagnosing the problem, the next phase of OD, with the OD interventions, involves the planning and implementation part of the change process.

Evaluation and feedback: Any OD activity is incomplete without proper feedback. Feedback is a process of relaying evaluations to the client group by means of specific report or interaction.