Organization Development

History

OD does not comprise a single theory, and so its origins lie in many different strands of applied behavioural science—individual psychology, group dynamics, leadership, organization theory, human resource management and elements from sociology and anthropology. In some respects, OD builds on all the major developments of organization theory and the interface of organizations with the people who work in them. Some of the experiments and research which are more directly related to the emergence of OD as a distinctive approach to managing planned change are as follows: (a) the work of Kurt Lewin on re-education, planned change, field theory, the stages of change and action research and his seminal work on group dynamics, and, in particular, the emergence of T-groups; (b) the work of Eric Trist and his associates in the Tavistock Institute in the UK on coal mining in Durham, which led to an understanding of how technology and people are interdependent and how organizations are sociotechnical systems; (c) the client-centred approach to helping individuals make their own personal change pioneered by Carl Rogers and (d) the approaches to surveying organizations developed by Rensis Likert and his colleagues in Michigan.

Much of the development of OD came out of Lewin’s discovery that attention to ‘here-and-now’ processes in a group provides a powerful vehicle for learning about groups. This insight was formalized in the T-group (‘T’ stands for training), which is an unstructured group led by a trainer who works in a non-directive manner. T-groups were organized by the National Training Laboratories (later the NTL Institute), which was founded by Lewin’s associates. NTL and T-groups are the most significant sources of origin of OD because (a) of the philosophy of the T-group, namely, the trainer works in a non-directive manner, and learning takes place out of what is happening in the group (a paradigm of action research) and (b) the pioneers and significant developers of OD were T-group trainers in the NTL [Page 576]Institute. It was when the T-group was being applied to working teams that the focus and term organization development emerged. In Britain, the Tavistock Institute developed its own form of the T-group in the Tavistock Conference, and its work on socio-technical systems paralleled OD.

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