Action Research and Organizational Development. Action research
For this assignment, first carefully review the required background materials. Make sure you are highly familiar with the main steps involved in action research and organizational development discussed in the readings. When you are finished reviewing the background materials, take a close look at the four scenarios below.
For each scenario below, think about the reasons why things did not work out well for the company in question. More specifically, think about which standard action research or organizational development step was not taken.
Your task for this assignment is not to explain what steps the organization should take—you would need to go into the company and do some lengthy action research in order to do this! Instead just review the standard action research and organizational development steps covered in the background materials and try to assess which key step was missing in the scenarios below.
Then write a 4- to 5-page paper addressing the following for each scenario:
What action research or organizational step was missing and
Why missing this step might have led to failure.
Make sure to discuss at least one of the required readings in your discussion of each scenario, and to cite all three of the required readings in your paper.
Sales have gone down at the XYZ Widget Corporation and nobody in the organization, including the CEO, seems to know why. They decide to hire an organizational development consultant to do some action research. The consultant and the CEO spend a lot of time discussing how to proceed and create a contract. The contract specifies that the consultant will limit his scope to finding factors that led to the decrease in sales and he will come up with a plan of action within one month. The consultant is busy with several other clients and doesn’t get much time to spend at XYZ. Facing the one month deadline, the consultant decides to repeat a recommendation he gave to several previous clients. The consultant then writes up a report recommending a large pay increase for the sales staff, which worked well for his previous clients. This change is carefully planned, and is implemented with strong support and enthusiasm from the sales staff. However, six months later sales are still down.
The Allmart Corporation is very concerned about the poor functioning of their inventory control and accounting processes. They hire a consultant who is an expert in this area who makes a good impression on them during the interview, and they immediately put him to work the day after the interview. The consultant conducts a survey with all employees in the accounting department and also has in-depth interviews with all managers in the department. The consultant shares his findings with Allmart’s top management team, and makes the primary recommendation that they implement a newer and more expensive accounting software package as he believes it is out of date software that is leading to inefficiencies in the department. Allmart’s CEO gets extremely upset that the client relied only on interviews and surveys and did not spend time directly observing the department’s accounting practices in action. Allmart ignores the consultant’s advice, and decides to hire a new consultant instead.
The Kooltrendy Internet software company has recently purchased Hardwrk, a competing Internet software company. Kooltrendy wants the merger to go through as smoothly as possible with minimal conflicts between employees of the two companies, so they have hired an organizational development consultant to look at ways to help ease this transition for all employees.
Kooltrendy interviews several consultants, but settles on one consultant who has a lot of experience with these types of mergers. After extensive discussions, it is agreed that the consultant will conduct extensive one-on-one interviews with employees as well as a large-scale survey that assesses employee values and attitudes. After carefully reviewing the survey and interview data, the consultant concludes that Kooltrendy has a very fun and laid-back corporate culture, whereas Hardwrk has a more competitive and serious corporate culture.
Satisfied that it knows how to fix the problem after hearing the consultant’s report, Kooltrendy immediately decides to implement “Fun Fridays” for Hardwrk employees that involve water gun fights, costume contests, or other activities every Friday in order to bring Hardwrk’s culture more in line with the laid-back culture of Kooltrendy. However, they are puzzled to see that every Friday more and more Hardwrk employees quit and they are unsure why the “Fun Fridays” solution did not work.
HN Motors is a large manufacturer of both cars and motorcycles. Given the new demand for high mileage vehicles, the company has decided to develop a car/motorcycle hybrid that has three wheels and looks like a tiny race car. However, neither the car department nor the motorcycle department wants to take the lead and the project keeps getting stalled.
HN Motors decides to hire a consultant to mediate the differences between the car and motorcycle departments, with the agreement that the consultant will spend a lot of time with both departments to get to the bottom of why they are so resistant to working on the new vehicle. During interviews with both departments, the consultant finds that all employees think the new hybrid vehicle is a good idea but they hate the idea of having “two bosses” and none of them wants to be in the position of having to report to both the director of the motorcycle department and the director of the car department.
The consultant recommends that HN Motors create a new “Hybrid Department” that only focuses on the new hybrid vehicle, and that this new department bring in a mix of employees from both the car and motorcycle department as well as some new employees.
HN Motors' management likes this recommendation and pay the consultant, but say that they can take it from here and don’t need the consultant’s services anymore. A few months later the project is still stalled and they don’t know why. They call up the consultant to try to get him to come back, but by now he is busy working with other clients.
Action Research and Organizational Development
Name
Institution
Action Research and Organizational Development
Introduction
Action research is a form of collaborative research that creates change within an organization and measures it with a view of progressive growth in processes aiming at creating a solution to a particular problem. The teams approach is at times referred to as Participatory Action Research (PAR) and it utilizes their collaborative efforts in a research project, although a single individual can conduct the research alone if it is agreed upon. The duty of researchers and stakeholders is to identify a problem, gather relevant information, and act using several research methods and interpret the results. These steps are repeated continuously in the AR process and the ultimate objective is to realize positive outcomes. The AR research method was pioneered by Kurt Lewin.
Organizational Development is ambiguous. Various authors have posited different meanings of the terminology and each of them mostly appeal to a subset of objectives. Generally, it embodies systematic actions taken with the aim of improving an organization’s capability using processes. OD focuses on both the human and social aspects of an organization and involves all stakeholders in problem solving and decision making. It aims at changing the entire system and takes a developmental perspective which focuses on both the organization and the individual members.
XYZ Widget Corporation
The sales decline situation at XYZ Corporation required the consultant to conduct a thorough action research, create organizational development interventions aimed at parsing the low sales situation, consult widely by engaging relevant stakeholders and groups before integration strategic change (Bradbury, 2015). Action Research is cyclic and requires a researcher to identify and limit the scope of the research, gather relevant information, review related literature before designing a research plan. In implementing the research plan, the researcher must collect the data, analyze it and develop an action plan. It is important then to involve stakeholders in sharing the information on the outcomes of the research and discuss the outcomes.
The gist of the problem at the XYZ Corporation was low sales, and the researcher should have focused on the causes of the dwindling sales. The goal should have been to remedy the bottleneck and increase sales, by improving on areas where there is laxity or correct something that is not done correctly. He should have synthesized the objectives of the research and narrow down to the topic. Once the area of research had been narrowed down, preliminary information gathering would be initiated. This should have been done by interrogating and gathering information that is topic specific from all the stakeholders involved in the organization such as the employees in the sales and marketing department, and the management regarding their policies and practices regarding sales. This would also provide a platform to gather their ideas on what should have been done right to remedy the situation, a useful tool for reconnaissance, which involves self reflection, description and explanation.
The consultant failed to follow the Action Research best practices because situations are not similar in any given circumstances. He instead copied and pasted a scenario that worked for a different organization in a separate environment. Research methodology is inherent in action research as hypothesizing floats the fundamental question in the research process and provides the guiding structure to the action research itself. Research problems such as the situation at XYZ require commitment for two basic reasons; it makes the researcher to have an in-depth understanding of the problem at hand and secondly, decisions are made based on data obtained from the research (Bradbury, 2015). The consultant at XYZ overlooked this critical component of research and in as long as a comprehensive action research is not conducted, the problems of the Corporation will not be solved. Using a participatory action research will enable the consultant incorporate diverse voices that will positively influence the outcomes of the specific issue under research. PAR has the possibility to assist the consultant easily get positive outcomes for a specific area of study.
AllMart Corporation
The problem at AllMart requires a Participatory Action Research model because despite the consultant being an expert in the focal area, input from the rest of the stakeholders is critical to achieving a lasting sol...