Organizational Change and

Development
Lecture 3
Diagnosis Process
Book Chapter 5
Revision
General Model of Planned Change
 General Model of Planned Change
• Entering and Contracting
– Those events help managers decide whether they want to engage further
in a planned change program and to commit resources to such a process.
Entering an organization involves gathering initial data to understand the
problems facing the organization or to determine the positive areas for
inquiry. Once this information is collected, the problems or opportunities
are discussed with managers and other organization members to develop
a contract or agreement to engage in planned change.
• Diagnosing
– Diagnosis can focus on understanding organizational problems, including
their causes and consequences, or on collecting stories about the
organization’s positive attributes. The diagnostic process is one of the
most important activities in OD. It includes choosing an appropriate
model for understanding the organization and gathering, analyzing, and
feeding back information to managers and organization members about
the problems or opportunities that exist.
 General Model of Planned Change
• Planning and Implementing Change
– They design interventions to achieve the organization’s vision or goals and make action
plans to implement them. There are several criteria for designing interventions,
including the organization’s readiness for change, its current change capability, its
culture and power distributions, and the change agent’s skills and abilities. Depending
on the outcomes of diagnosis, there are four major types of interventions in OD:
1. Human process interventions at the individual, group, and total system levels
2. Interventions that modify an organization’s structure and technology
3. Human resources interventions that seek to improve member performance and
wellness
4. Strategic interventions that involve managing the organization’s relationship to its
external environment and the internal structure and process necessary to support a
business strategy
• Evaluating and Institutionalizing Change
– The final stage in planned change involves evaluating the effects of the intervention and
managing the institutionalization of successful change programs so they persist.
– Feedback to organization members about the intervention’s results provides information
about whether the changes should be continued, modified, or suspended.
Institutionalizing successful changes involves reinforcing them through feedback,
rewards, and training.
Learning Outcome 1

PURPOSE OF DIAGNOSIS IN
ORGANIZATION DEVELOPMENT (OD).
 Diagnosis
• Diagnosis is the process of understanding how the organization is currently
functioning, and it provides the information necessary to design change interventions.
• Diagnosis help OD practitioners and client members jointly determine which
organizational issues to focus on, how to collect and analyze data to understand them,
and how to work together to develop action steps from the diagnosis.
• An organization (patient) experiencing problems seeks help from an OD practitioner
(doctor); the practitioner examines the organization, finds the causes of the problems,
and prescribes a solution. Diagnosis in organization development, however, is much
more collaborative than such a medical perspective implies and does not accept the
implicit assumption that something is wrong with the organization.
• For example, a manager might seek an OD practitioner’s help to reduce absenteeism
in his or her department. The manager and an OD consultant jointly might decide to
diagnose the cause of the problem by examining company absenteeism records and
by interviewing selected employees about possible reasons for absenteeism.
Alternatively, they might examine employee loyalty and discover the organizational
elements that encourage people to stay. Analysis of those data could uncover
determinants of absenteeism or loyalty in the department, thus helping the manager
and the OD practitioner jointly to develop an appropriate intervention to address the
issue.
 Diagnosis
• In those cases where organizations do have specific problems, diagnosis can
be problem oriented, seeking reasons for the problems. On the other hand,
as suggested by the absenteeism example above, the OD practitioner and
the client may choose one of the newer views of organization change and
frame the issue positively. Additionally, the client and the OD practitioner
may be looking for ways to enhance the organization’s existing functioning
• For example, a manager might be interested in using OD to improve a
department that already seems to be functioning well. Diagnosis might
include an overall assessment of both the task performance capabilities of
the department and the impact of the department on its individual
members. This process seeks to uncover specific areas for future
development of the department’s effectiveness.
• Diagnosis may be aimed at uncovering the causes of specific problems,
focused on understanding effective processes, or directed at assessing the
overall functioning of the organization or department to discover areas for
future development. Diagnosis provides a systematic understanding of
organizations so that appropriate interventions may be developed for
solving problems and enhancing effectiveness.
Learning Outcome 2

THE NEED FOR DIAGNOSTIC

MODELS
 Need for Diagnostic Models
• Diagnostic conceptions can vary from intuitive hunches to scientific
explanations of how organizations function. Conceptual frameworks that OD
practitioners use to understand organizations are referred to as “diagnostic
models.” They describe the relationships among different features of the
organization, as well as its environment and its effectiveness. As a result,
diagnostic models point out what areas to examine and what questions to
ask in assessing how an organization is functioning.
• Focusing attention on particular features, often to the exclusion of others,
can result in a biased diagnosis. For example, a diagnostic model that relates
team effectiveness to the handling of interpersonal conflict would lead an
OD practitioner to ask questions about relationships among members,
decision-making processes, and conflict resolution methods. Although
relevant, those questions ignore other group issues such as member skills
and knowledge, the complexity of the tasks performed by the group, and
task interdependencies. Thus, OD practitioners must choose diagnostic
models and processes carefully to address the organization’s presenting
problems as well as to ensure comprehensiveness.
 Need for Diagnostic Models
• Major sources of diagnostic models in OD are the thousands of articles
and books that discuss, describe, and analyze how organizations
function. The studies often concern a specific facet of organizational
behavior, such as employee stress, leadership, motivation, problem
solving, group dynamics, job design, and career development. They
also can involve the larger organization and its context, including the
environment, strategy, structure, and culture. Diagnostic models can
be derived from that information by noting the dimensions or
variables that are associated with an organization’s effectiveness.
• Another source of diagnostic models is OD practitioners’ experience in
organizations. So-called “field knowledge” offers a wealth of practical
information about how organizations operate. Unfortunately, only a
small part of that vast experience has been translated into diagnostic
models that represent the professional judgments of people with
years of experience in organizational diagnosis.
 Open-Systems Model
• open-systems model recognizes that organizations exist in the context of a
larger environment that affects how the organization performs, and, in
turn, is affected by how the organization interacts with it. The model
suggests that organizations acquire specific inputs from the environment
and transform them using social and technical processes. The outputs of
the transformation process are returned to the environment and
information about the consequences of those outputs serve as feedback to
the organization’s functioning.
• The open-systems model also suggests that organizations and their
subsystems— groups and individual jobs—share a number of common
features that explain how they are organized and how they function. For
example, open systems display a hierarchical ordering. Each higher level of
system is composed of lower-level systems: Systems at the level of society
are comprised of organizations; organizations are comprised of groups; and
groups are comprised of individual jobs. Although systems at different
levels vary in many ways—in size and complexity, for example—they have a
number of common characteristics by virtue of being open systems.
 Open-Systems Model
• Environments Environments are everything outside of the system that can directly or
indirectly affect its outputs. Open systems, such as organizations and groups, exchange
information and resources with their environments. Because these external forces
influence the system, organizations cannot completely control their own behavior.
• Inputs Inputs consist of human capital or other resources, such as information, energy,
and materials, coming into the system from the environment. For example, a
manufacturing organization acquires raw materials from an outside supplier. Similarly,
a hospital nursing unit acquires information concerning a patient’s condition from the
attending physician. In each case, the system (organization or nursing unit) obtains
resources (raw materials or information) from its environment.
• Transformations Transformations are the processes of converting inputs into outputs.
In organizations, a production or operations function composed of both social and
technological components generally carries out transformations. The social
component consists of people and their work relationships, whereas the technological
component involves tools, techniques, and methods of production or service delivery.
Research and development departments can transform the latest scientific advances
into new product ideas, and bank tellers can transform customer requests into valued
services.
 Open-Systems Model
• Outputs Outputs are the results of what is transformed by the system and
sent to the environment. Group health insurance companies receive
premiums and medical bills, transform them through record keeping, and
export payments to hospitals and physicians.
• Boundaries Boundaries—the borders or limits of the system—help to
protect or buffer the organization’s transformation process from external
disruptions; they also assure that the right inputs enter the organization
and the relevant outputs leave it. For example, to facilitate managerial
control, a department’s boundaries could encompass all members
reporting to a common administrator; to promote a smooth workflow, the
department’s boundaries might include suppliers, employees, and
customers located along a common supply chain; or to foster cohesion
among members, the department’s boundaries could embrace those
members sharing particular social connections and attitudes.
 Open-Systems Model
• Feedback As shown in Figure 5.1, feedback is information
regarding the actual performance or the outputs of the system.
Not all such information is feedback, however. Only information
used to control the future functioning of the system is considered
feedback. Feedback can be used to maintain the system in a
steady state (for example, keeping an assembly line running at a
certain speed) or to help the organization adapt to changing
circumstances. McDonald’s, for example, has strict feedback
processes to ensure that a meal in one outlet is as similar as
possible to a meal in any other outlet
• Alignment How well a system’s different parts and elements align
with each other partly determines its overall effectiveness. This
alignment or fit concerns the relationships between the
organization and its environment as well as among the
components that comprise the design of the organization.
Alignment represents the extent to which the features and
operations of one component support the effectiveness of
another component.
Book Reading
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