Organizational Development Interventions Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Organizational Development Interventions - Essay Example The idea that organizational change needs to be coordinated across a number of dimensions--of which structure and culture might be seen as the two most fundamental is not in itself very new, and has become conventional wisdom in change circles since McKinsey published its well-known Seven S framework, and Peters and Waterman (1982) first aired their excellence truism, "soft is hard." Yet within this literature, it is clear that some alignments have generated more interest and debate than others. From this point of view, organization design--or to be more precise, designing--is concerned with more than neat pictures and "hard" abstract configurations of roles and responsibilities on paper. It is about putting "the human side of change" back into the design process. Changing an organizations structure, from this perspective, implies paying attention to the underlying, emergent processes and systems that connect and activate structural frameworks. In practical terms, this means combining traditional organization design with more sensitive, microlevel interventions designed to open up and reconstruct the organizations underlying working structure. The organization has an institutional own life, which is notoriously difficult to control and manage. (Barley, 1997, 101) It has long been accepted that leadership is a critical factor in the success of change programmes. Much of the literature on leadership and change, however, has tended to concentrate on capabilities and qualities required of key executives and change managers and to overlook the notion of leadership as a process, the property of a system rather than a single person. Such a view can be highly problematic, leading to a rather overromanticized perspective on change, and the hope that a magical, quasi-mystical leader will somehow emerge to take the organization out of the wilderness.