Organization Development [antikvár]

Foreword: Observations on the State of Organization Development SOME HISTORICAL NOTES Organization development as a practice evolved in the 1950s out of the work of the National Training Labs (NTL) on group dynamics and leadership. At the same time, a number of social psychology departments and business schools were discovering that traditional industrial psychology no longer met the varied needs of organizations. The concepts and tools available in the early days of the field were mostly diagnostic and individual oriented, and therefore did not fully respond to the problems that many organizations were facing. Of particular importance to OD's beginning was the discovery in the T-groups (T for training) of the power of "experiential" learning in groups and in the organizational arena. This combining of new forms of intervention and new concepts of group dynamics and leadership in effect created the field of OD. OD had come a long way by the mid-1960s. This led Dick Beckhard, Warren Bennis, and me to start to design the Addison-Wesley series on organization development. We knew that we wanted a book series rather than a single book on OD because the field was, even at that time, too diverse to lend itself to a single volume. Some practitioners saw the future in terms of new ways of looking at interpersonal dynamics. Some saw it as a new set of values for how organizations should be managed. Some focused on group and intergroup problems. Still others tried to conceptualize how a total change program for an organization would look. Many different approaches were proposed on how best to deal with organizational issues and the management of change. No one model dominated the scene, and various "experimental interventions" within organizations were the order of the day. XV