What is Organizational Development? Discuss Organizational Development Process.

Organizational Development: Organizational development is a system-wide application of behavioral science knowledge to the planned development and reinforcement of organizational strategies, structures, and processes for improving an organization's effectiveness.

According to Newstrom & Keith Davis."Organizational development is an intervention strategy that uses group processes to focus in the whole culture of an organization in order to bring about planned change."

According to Schmuck & Miles,"Organizational development can be define as a planned sustained effort to apply behavioral science for system improvement, using reflexive and self analytical methods.

Warren Bennis describe organizational development as," A complex strategy intended to change the beliefs, attitudes, values, and structure of organizations so that they can better adapt to new technologies, markets, and challenges."

Organizational Development Process: The organizational development process is complicated and it takes long time to complete the process. It takes minimum of one year and sometimes continues indefinitely. There are different approaches to organizational development process but the typical process consists of seven steps.

• Initial Diagnosis: It is necessary to find out the professional and competent people within the organization to plan and execute OD activities. If Competent people are not available within the organization the service activities analysis of documents and reports for diagnosing the problem.
• Data Collection: Survey method is used to collect the data and information for determining organizational climate and identifying the behavioral problems.
• Data Feedback and Confrontation: Data collected are analyzed and reviewed by various work groups formed from this purpose in order to mediate in the areas of disagreement or confrontation or ideas or opinions and to establish priorities.
• Selection and Design of Interventions: The interventions are the planned activities that are introduced into the system to accomplish desired change and improvements. At this stage the suitable interventions are to be selected and designed.
• Implementation of Intervention: The selected intervention should be implemented. Intervention may take the form of workshops, feedback of data to the participants, group discussions, written exercises, on the job activities,  redesign of control system etc.
• Action Planning and Problem Solving: Groups prepare recommendations and specific action planning to solve the specific and identified problems by using data collected.
• Team Building: The consultants encourage the employees throughout the process to form into groups and teams by explaining the advantages of the teams in the OD process, by arranging joint meetings with the managers, subordinated etc.
• Inter Group Development: The consultants encourage the inter group meetings, interaction etc, after the formation of groups/teams.

Conclusion: The organization finally has to evaluate the OD programs, find out their utility, and develop the programs further for correcting the deviations and/or improved results. the consultants help the organization in this respect. All the steps in the OD process should be followed by the organization is order to derive full range of OD benefits.