Organizational Development Essay

* Organizational Development Essay

Chaunte Rhone

MGT/309

February 07, 2012

Instructor Jenny Brown

Understanding organizational development is essential in today’s business environment. The field of organizational development has specific characteristics and purposes worth exploring. Organizational development has a five-step model process that can be effective in assisting organizations to initiating change. Describing how the five-step model process for organizational development accomplishes goals and exemplifies organizational development characteristics is an important concept to explore.

Characteristics and Purpose of the Organizational Development (OD) Field

When describing characteristics of the OD field a clear understanding of what organizational development is important. Organizational development is a process by which organizations participate in continuous efforts to accomplish organizational goals through change and within a changing business environment. To survive and improve in any business environment organizations will change and how well those organizations adapt to those changes will depend on the organization’s processes to promote effectively and nurture individual growth to achieve those organizational goals and objectives. According to the academic text, “Organization development efforts are planned, systematic approaches to change. They involve changes to the total organization or to relatively large segments of it” (Brown, 2006, p. 05). The characteristics of OD include change, collaborative approach, performance orientation, humanistic orientation, systems approach, and scientific method.

Change

Change is a characteristic of the OD, which involves organizations taking steps and creating processes to make changes within an organization to address specific organizational issues that may impede successful achievement of organizational...