413 – Final Examination Questions/Reflection Summaries. Organizational Development

Organizational Development
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Organizational Development
1 Organizational development involves planning change processes in an organization as part of the corporate culture. Organizational development, behavioral science, research, and theory for the continuation of companies. They are long term efforts of improving an organization in terms of its ability to cope with the external and internal environment. Most organizations hire behavioral scientists to help them achieve their organization's Organizational development is also a practice that relies on the application of different systems and transferring behavioral science to developmental improvement. The company then reinforces the structures and strategies that lead to improved organizational effectiveness. Established organizations such as Apple and Amazon depend on organizational development to facilitate continuous improvement of their products and their corporate goals. It is, therefore, imperative for all organizations to invest in their organizational development.
In its basic form, human society presents itself as an organization and manifested as intertwined individual units that must work together for the functionality of the community (Hale, Norgate & Traeger, 2018). Society is also subject to evolving for it to achieve its ultimate goal, which is to provide each individual with a safe and comfortable environment where they can achieve their personal goals. Organizational development is, therefore, an essential part of society since it helps in the gradual achievement of societal goals, which, in turn, facilitate individuals to achieve their personal goals. It blends theory and practice to bring the best out of employees in organizations. When an organization stresses the importance of organizational development, it can deal with issues such as conflict resolution and external and internal changes that may affect a company’s operations over time.
Organizational development’s history goes back to the end of the second world war. Due to the shortage of workers and resources to keep companies operational, a need to come up with a way of maximizing the use of organizational resources and the available workers arose. Different organizations joined hands and worked together with social scientists in search of methods of improving and optimizing the use of company resources. The union between managers and social scientists with little support from the government lead to the creation of two distinct approaches aimed at increasing output from the scares personnel and resources. Organizational development was the primary strategy developed by social scientists and managers to improve the quality of products through increased production without increasing the number of employees and resources. Since the conception or organizational development, improvement of workers in companies, and the development of different levels of the organizations became a critical part of maximizing effectiveness.
2 The organizational development sector has evolved tremendously since its inception during the post-first world war period in the 1940s. Since context is essential to the continuity of corporate development, companies have come up with different adaptation practices to improve the old organizational development practices and develop new ones to continue enhancing their effectiveness. Similarly, new regulatory challenges arise every day, and companies have to device new ways of dealing with them. In 1990, a book by Peter Drucker called Managing the future focused on the importance of organizational leaders learning the future risks and challenges for their organizations to survive (Majumdar, 2020). The scope and scale of organizational development techniques have changed significantly in the last three decades as technological, political, and managerial skills have evolved. Modern organizations are also working closely with social scientists to assess new challenges and device new ways of managing them in the same way organizational development got developed.
According to Hale, Norgate & Traeger (2018), Bradford is one of the most influential people in the history and development of organizational culture. He was the person in charge of in-service training at the United States Immigration department in 1945 when the National government chose the Naturalization and immigration services to develop different training programs for other agencies. The selection allowed Bradford to work with a method that he had always wanted to use in practice. This training method focused on training as an integrated program for organizational and individual growth. Bradford’s idea was unique during the early stages of corporate development, an idea that leads to the full-blown conceptualization of what is now known as OD or organizational development. His innovative ideas also lead to the development of other adequate training techniques such as laboratory training and the evolution of corporate growth.
3 In 1946 during the initial stages of organizational development, Kurt Lewis and his colleagues were asked to assist in training Connecticut’s community leaders, after which they recorded that some of the leaders who attended had given feedback that described their behavior. After the successful training session at the Center of Group Dynamics by Kurt Lewis, Bradford and other scholars assessed the laboratory learning method had a significant impact on transitioning companies from the old training techniques (Fourman, 2019). Human relations were found to be the most effective method of managing organizations. The technique is related to the Participation management program, which uses four distinct management systems. The techniques ninclude benefit authoritative system, exploitive authentic systems, participatory system, and consultative systems. Likert conducted a survey feedback process in a specific company’s research process and found out that the most critical thing in organizational development was the enhancement of organizational and managerial effectiveness. Therefore, Organizational Development is the foundation of Change management in all organizations.
Employee motivation is also another aspect of the running of an organization that necessitated the development of organizational development. Since the initial goal was to come up with ways of boosting the effectiveness of employees without increasing their numbers, employee motivation wa...