Organizational Development

Every life – and every organization – is mythic territory. I believe that breakthrough thinking cannot be taught; it can only be learned through experience. In order to create that learning experience we delve into myth, and archetypal psychology, the branch of psychology whose field of attention is image, images that spark the imagination and ignite the soul to find out what really works. Every corporate story begins with an idea that becomes an expanded and shared vision. Before that vision is well shared, much less completely implemented, the organization must pass through a developmental process that is similar to all human development. Along the road to success, many organizations lose awareness of foundational stories that contain fundamental operating principles, flounder in direction, lose market share, and disempower their brain trust. A mission statement that remains on a wall has no substance. It informs the reader of what is claimed. For a mission statement to be meaningful, it must come from a working belief, a mythos. In these pages I will use an archetype of transformation: the Hero's Journey, initially described by mythologist Joseph Campbell (1968), as a working map, a tool for transformation in the corporate environment. Myths are not just told; they are felt as they resonate throughout the body as well as the heart and mind. This is for the social architects, the collaborative chemists, and the inspira-tional dreamers who believe that they can indeed, change the world.

The field of organizational development, along with other prevalent perspectives on planned organizational change, is based in a unitary and instrumental perspective on organizational change in which leadership and change agents strategically articulate one primary direction for change in the organization. This approach assumes a high degree of leadership consensus on the nature and direction of change, based on a linear, planned process of gathering data to solve problems in the organization. Communication in this model of change is employed instrumentally to transmit information about the change throughout the organization with an emphasis on transmitting information clearly, unambiguously, and efficiently.

Some scholars argue that this traditional, instrumental perspective is far from universally successful empirically in the implementation of change, and that it neglects more recent pluralist, constructionist, and postmodern approaches to organizational theory and communication. Of these more recent approaches, discursive orientations to change stress how change occurs socially within organizations through communicative interaction in the form of verbal and written texts. This paper provides a brief overview of discursive perspectives on organizational change, with rationale for adoption of discursive perspectives within the field of HRD.

"Since its very inception, social work has been considered an organizationally based profession, with the majority of its workforce employed within formal organizations. Whether in nonprofit, for-profit, or governmental agencies, the practical realities of human service organizations are a central element of professional social work. This book explores the climate and culture of these agencies and provides essential information for surviving and thriving in this setting. It prepares students for their future careers so that they will feel empowered in their work and be able to fulfill their responsibilities toward organizational, community, and social change. Using real-life examples, the authors examine the internal structures of management, financing, and supervision and discuss common conflicts between agencies and professionals. The book’s straightforward tone and practical advice make it an asset to anyone entering human service organizations.

This new edition contains updated examples, case studies, and references. It also contains valuable information on the effects of the recent financial crisis on human service organizations. Agencies now face increased caseloads and more complex social problems with fewer resources and less money. Understanding how these events have changed the nature of human service organizations will allow students to be better prepared for the work ahead of them.

Features

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Expanded content on the practical aspects of organizational theory and suggestions for developing leadership skills
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Updated examples, case studies, and references throughout the book
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Key points and discussion questions following each chapter
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Updated instructor’s manual available online as a PDF or Word document"

ABSTRACT
Objectives of the Study
The objective of this mixed methods case study is two-fold. First, it explores corporate learning using the theory of organizational knowledge creation and one US based corporation to determine the theory’s relevance to American firms. Second, it seeks to understand how social practices and leadership behaviors affect employee knowledge or “true beliefs” and thus the implications to the firm’s knowledge creation and ultimately, its competitive advantage. Ikujiro Nonaka’s theory of organizational knowledge creation is used as the framework to examine the extent to which internal factors affect knowledge creation at the organizational and employee levels. The research addresses two questions regarding Nonaka’s theory: 1) it assesses the theory in a US corporation with a relatively homogenous population to determine the validity of the theory that was developed outside the US and 2) it examines to what extent internal factors such as social practices and leadership behaviors affect the organizational knowledge creation process. In addition, consequences from events external to the firm are assessed to determine their impact on knowledge creation and corporate learning.
Summary
The study used knowledge creation theory to understand how internal behaviors and external events affected corporate learning and competitive advantage. Given that knowledge is only useful in its context, the introduction described the origins of the firm and impact of the Internet. The literature review provided the historical context for organizational culture in US firms, the growth of learning organizations and it summarized organizational knowledge creation theory. Social practices and leadership behaviors were explored in relation to a variety of topics. The research used quantitative and qualitative data that included survey data and qualitative data collected from semi-structured interviews, direct observation, internal documents, and secondary sources. The variety of sources aided the attempt to identify robust answers to the broad research questions raised in the study.
Conclusions
The interviews and direct observations at the firm reveal that organizational knowledge creation is not evident in this US corporation, primarily due to the narrow way in which knowledge is perceived and leadership behaviors that fail to consistently empower subordinates in the hierarchical management model. The cultural beliefs that preclude knowledge creation were also observed to thwart corporate learning. Several social practices and leadership behaviors appear to influence employee beliefs and thus corporate learning including communication transparency, decision-making and accountability, and strategic responses to external “random” events in digital communication. Shortcomings in these areas appear to have related and unintended consequences of diminished trust, lack of confidence, and risk aversion that can jeopardize the firm’s competitive advantage.

Leadership is everywhere: it has a dominant and privileged place in our society; it is constantly in our news, politics, businesses, films, books and magazines. Leadership is part of our social narrative, predominantly as a mythological force of goodness and success.
A key aim of this book is to deconstruct leadership, to challenge over-simplified accounts of leadership that may be desirable and offer us the comfort of ‘messiahs’ who can save us, but that actually distort leadership in unhelpful ways. Another aim is to reconstruct leadership, to offer new accounts of leadership for new times.
The  book identifies four dominant leadership discourses that have developed through socio-political and economic forces. The first 3 are Controller Leadership , Therapist Leadership, Messiah Leadership  reveal how leadership has developed in relation to changing contexts the past century. The final emergent discourse outlined is Eco-Leadership, and this chapter points to the need for new leadership for new times.

Français, 237 pages - Ce manuel de Développement Organisationnel à l'intention des OSC a été édité par Henri Valot. Les principales thématiques abordées sont : la gouvernance organisationnelle/associative ; structure et culture organisationnelle ; leadership transformationnel ; égalité du genre
dans le développement organisationnel ; enjeux et défis de la légitimité et redevabilité de la société civile ; la mobilisation des ressources ; le suivi-évaluation et la capitalisation ; les stratégies de
communication ; les fondamentaux d’un réseau associatif ; techniques d’élaboration d’un plan stratégique d’une organisation, et enfin la méthodologie de suivi de la formation nationale de
formateurs/trices en Développement Organisationnel dans les régions.

Abstract: As the world enters a new millennium, the U.S. military simultaneously enters a new era in warfare -- an era in which warfare is affected by a changing strategic environment and rapid technological change. The United States and its multinational partners are experiencing a transition from the Industrial Age to the Information Age. Simultaneously, it is fully engaged in a global war on terrorism set in a new period of globalization. These changes, as well as the experiences gained during recent and ongoing military operations, have resulted in the current drive to transform the force with network-centric warfare (NCW) as the centerpiece of this effort. This document describes how the tenets and principles of NCW are providing the foundation for developing new warfighting concepts, organizations, and processes that will allow U.S. forces to maintain a competitive advantage over potential adversaries, now and in the future. In sum, the report provides an overview of the ongoing implementation of NCW in the Department of Defense (DoD). A brief description of NCW, including its origins, its central role in force transformation, its tenets and principles, and an implementation strategy, are provided in Chapter 1. An examination of NCW as an emerging theory of war, its relationship to the four domains of Information Age warfare, the growing evidence of its benefits, and the warfighting advantages it can provide are examined in Chapter 2. Chapter 3 focuses on network-centric operations (NCO), including the relationship of NCO to the overarching Joint Operations Concepts (JOpsC), the NCO experience in Afghanistan and Iraq, the development of the NCO Conceptual Framework, and the conduct of NCO case studies. An overview of Joint and Service plans and initiatives to develop and implement network-centric capabilities and the growing investment in these capabilities by our allies and multinational partners are provided in Chapter 4

The need for 21st-century mindsets and protocols has sparked interest in design thinking. That is a human-centered, prototype-driven process for the exploration of new ideas that can be applied to operations, products, services, strategies, and even management.

Dissemination is the interactive process of communicating knowledge to target audiences so that it may be used to lead to change. The challenge is to improve the accessibility of desired knowledge products by those they are intended to reach. This means ensuring physical availability of the product to as large a proportion of the target audience as possible and making the product comprehensible to those who receive it.

From a societal point of view, art has a key relevance: Art is a means to pursue the cultural questions posed about interrelations, perceptions of realities and meanings (critique and value formation) in an aesthetic mode of working. It is a multivalent communication (communication system) which, through a varying contextualization, evades a specific translation (interpretation) and, in this way, forms a resource for reflection—on the personal level, through the beholder, and on the societal level, as a system.
In terms of the progressing differentiation of art systems (horizontal differentiation), this is accompanied by a shift of emphasis so that its focus is not (any longer) on the production of objects and in particular their display in art contexts (labelled as such). Instead, what is now its focus is the designing of processes influencing developments as well as the integration of a range of disciplines. Rather than artists being the experts on questions of design, they are now being inquired as experts on issues related to perception and its relationing. As a result, perceptual (aesthetic) skills and their artistic application in social contexts (relationing) represent a crucial ability, and the medium and the canon of media becomes secondary.


// full text: https://artrelated.net/ruediger_john/critical-aesthetic-work-economy-sciences.html // PDF: https://artrelated.net/ruediger_john/critical-aesthetic-work-economy-sciences-ruediger-john.pdf

This work is focussed on the deployment of innovation in an educational charity to ensure its survival and re-growth a challenging climate. By the nature of its specialisation, the management of knowledge, learning and innovation are implicit in the operations of this charity and could be assumed to be required core competencies of this type of charity. Innovation is here broadly defined to encompass a range of new products or services, process technologies or programs pertaining to organisation members.
This charity has recently found itself in challenging times and its survival is under threat. If it is to survive into the future, it must find a way to innovatively deliver both its services and fundraising efforts. Innovation in operations and delivery is needed as a strategic tool in the design and emergence of a revitalised organisation. This work recommends processes and actions the charity must adopt to achieve this aim.

Concern Worldwide, as the consortium leader, is implementing a project Building Disaster Resilience in Pakistan funded by DFID-UK. Our team was hired to carry out field research and develop Gender Equality Strategy for the Project. Co-authored by Shahzad Bukhari.

This paper was my 3rd essay @ Saybrook University and presents a "how to" think about encouraging face-to-face leader conversations that are relevant yet also disclosing more than what's expected in key leadership storytelling moments--please consider the model for a starting point in your re-thinking the power of personalized storytelling @ work en route to created meaning-making and conscious cultures.

This research is a preliminary study, which aims to examine the relationship among peer relationship, organizational commitment, organizational culture and job satisfaction. Besides, the mediation role, the study also investigates the significance of job satisfaction. Further, while investigating the moderating impact of psychological capital “PsyCap” between the peer relationship and organizational commitment, it determined that PsyCap strengthens peer relationship and organizational commitment in Pakistan Railways. Thus, at large, job satisfaction had played mediating role between culture and employee commitment. On the other hand, PsyCap has a moderating impact in this study, whereas the job satisfaction does not arbitrate among peer relationships, organizational culture and organizational commitment.

Innovation is a critical factor in building an organization’s culture of growth. Provided that it is properly blended with organizational development initiatives and aligned with the organization’s strategy, it supplies a compelling advantage for the growth process. Neglecting to encompass innovation in an organization’s culture could lead to shrinkage and even extinction, in the case of an intensively competitive market. Executive staff must consider innovative technologies and be aware of all growth opportunities. However, this staff is stressed under information overload. A need exists to reduce the information load and filter available technologies according to the specific needs of the organization. In this paper, the authors propose a recommendation approach to match the needs of an organization against existing technologies (innovative products or services). The organization expresses its customized needs by declaring its preferences over a small reference set of indicative t...

Creative interventions as a strategic tool in organizations have gained an increased interest with the hope to handle the complex, chaotic and interactional environments in the global competition. In this study we explore an organization which has involved an artist to facilitate a creative change in its working routines. The study is based on qualitative methods inspired by ethnography. Aesthetic perspective on organizations, design thinking and artistic intervention literature form the main theoretical frame. In the first phase of the two-year-long intervention project we have noticed a lot of problems depending on the differing business logics and the artistic logics, the artistic and designerly methods in practice have shown a lot of similarities.

The action evaluation process at a mediation agency in Dayton, Ohio, that offers the services of trained volunteers is described. Action evaluation is an integrated research and intervention methodology for helping to define, promote, and assess success in an endeavor, while using evaluation as a bridge between research and practice in ways that promote greater quality in both. The action evaluation process includes: (1) a baseline stage that incorporates a systematic process for cooperative goal setting, team-building and participatory decision making; (2) a formative stage in which participants refine their goals and begin working toward them; and (3) a summative stage in which participants take stock of their progress using their evolved goals to establish criteria for retrospective assessment. How these stages evolved at the Dayton Mediation Center is described. The experiences of the Center show that action evaluation is more than an effective process of goal articulation and d...

This study was carried out to understand the impact of demographic factors on employee perception about distributive and procedural justice. Four demographic variables, namely: age, gender, status and tenure of employees, were chosen as predictors, and their relationship with the two dependent variables: procedural and distributive justice, was studied. A total of eight hypotheses were formulated, linking each predictor to both dependent variables, individually. A questionnaire was then designed consisting of structured questions, determining employees’ perceptions towards distributive and procedural justice in their organizations. Unrestricted non-probability sampling was employed to choose respondents working in different organizations – from universities to banks, and contact was established via survey. Data thus collected was processed using SPSS and analyzed through ANOVA and One-Sample T-test. It was seen that none of the predictors caused a significant variation in employee perceptions, except in the case of status and procedural justice, where significant variations were observed with respect to employee responses at different levels or positions in organizations.

A case study for organizational behavior based on the "DownCity"episode of the fourth season of Kitchen Nightmares.

This document contains (1) a summary of the series (2) a list of the cast of characters (3) an episode recap and (4) two discussion questions suitable for classroom use in undergraduate courses such as organizational behavior and principles of management.

For solutions to the discussion questions, please email "starling.hunter@alumni.duke.edu" with the phrase "Solution request" in the subject line.

SHOW SUMMARY Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares is a television program featuring British celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay first broadcast on Channel 4 in 2004 in the UK. An American adaptation of this show entitled Kitchen Nightmares debuted September 19, 2007 on Fox. In each episode, Ramsay visits a failing restaurant and acts as a troubleshooter to help improve the establishment in just one week. Ramsay revisits the restaurant a few months later to see how business has fared in his absence.

Executive summary: Exploring alternative feasible futures through engaging in a collaborative futures scenario development process has identified and prioritized a series of Key Actions for the ECI and its member organisations over the next 10 to 20 years. The very real challenges of how to most effectively address uncertain futures and rapidly changing working environments catalysed this work. The ECI Futures Task Force worked alongside the Big Ideas research team at Loughborough University to investigate and debate the ...

Knowledge Entrepreneurship emerged in the wake of a fluid environment evolved from the industrial economy. It is that entrepreneurship that drives knowledge and it is in turn driven by knowledge. When knowledge entrepreneurship is applied into the production function in right and desired proportion, it becomes a gate opener for wealth creation. Thus, this study show the imperatives that, as knowledge entrepreneurship is adapted it evolves a knowledge entrepreneurship economy with wide gates for wealth creation opened as the resulting effect in Nigeria. The study further showed that the literacy rate, globalization penetration index and Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (NSME) combines to make for effective knowledge entrepreneurship with high output in wealth creation for Nigeria. Lastly, the study was based on secondary data and survey methodology deployed whilst meta-analysis performed on the hypothesis to answer the research questions posited with recommendations for policy. 

Keywords: Knowledge and Knowledge Management, Knowledge Entrepreneurship, Wealth and Gate Opener.

ABSTRACT
The role of training and education in the development of senior management and leaders is critical to the long-term development of organisations. This paper seeks to explore and discuss the methods used for training and developing senior and executive managers across Africa, China, Europe and the Middle East. The paper outlines the methods used to identify training needs, selection of trainers and trainees, curriculum development and implementation of delivery. The paper further considers the evaluation criteria used to gauge the success of training in meeting training needs and provides an insight into the challenges faced by course designers and deliverers. The paper uses evidence collected over a five-year period between 2005-2009 on groups of senior managers and executives receiving training in the UK, sponsored by both British and other national governments. The paper has found little difference in the manner in which curriculum has been developed and how trainees are selected. However, the training needs and the identification of trainers have shown differences in approach and selection. Whilst there is evidence to suggest that training needs have been met, this is only in the short term and long-term needs are yet to be addressed. Furthermore, in support of long-term objectives, the ability to recognise and accommodate religion and culture remain areas necessitating further understanding.

ABSTRAK
Peranan yang dimainkan oleh latihan dan pendidikan dalam perkembangan pengurusan kanan dan pemimpin adalah kritikal bagi perkembangan jangka panjang organisasi. Kertas kajian ini bertujuan meneliti dan membincangkan kaedah yang digunakan untuk melatih dan membentuk para pengurus eksekutif dan kanan di Afrika, China, Eropah dan Timur Tengah. Kertas ini menggariskan kaedah yang digunakan bagi mengenal pasti keperluan latihan, pemilihan pelatih dan jurulatih, perkembangan kurikulum dan pelaksanaan penyampaian. Kertas ini juga meneliti kriteria penilaian yang digunakan bagi menilai kejayaan sesuatu latihan dalam memenuhi keperluan latihan dan seterusnya memberikan tanggapan tentang cabaran yang bakal dihadapi oleh pereka kursus dan para penyampai. Kertas ini menggunakan bukti yang dikumpul bagi tempoh lima tahun antara 2005-2009 bagi kumpulan-kumpulan pengurus kanan dan eksekutif yang menerima latihan di UK, yang ditaja oleh kedua-dua kerajaan British dan kerajaan-kerajaan lain. Kertas ini mendapati terdapatnya perbezaan yang kecil antara cara kurikulum dibentuk dan cara pelatih dipilih. Walau bagaimanapun, daripada segi keperluan latihan dan pengenalpastian jurulatih, terdapat perbezaan daripada sudut kaedah dan pemilihan. Walaupun terdapat bukti yang menunjukkan bahawa keperluan latihan sudah dipenuhi, namun ia hanya berbentuk jangka pendek dan keperluan jangka panjang masih belum dipenuhi. Selain itu, dalam menyokong objektif jangka panjang, keupayaan untuk menambil kira dan seterusnya memasukkan agama dan kebudayaan masih menjadi bidang yang memerlukan pemahaman lanjut.

Organizations are similar to cars: both require fuel to power them and a driver to direct them. In an organization, the fuel is its culture and the driver is initially its founder and in later years its current chief executive. Just as cars require fuel to function, organizations share key cultural factors in order to exist. Uniquely, some organizations are able to elevate themselves beyond basic existence into a coveted realm of high performance. Doing so is difficult, and requires ten additives that convert a group’s culture into a H.I.G.H. O.C.T.A.N.E. source of power that can transform it into a high performing entity. I. UNDERSTANDING OCTANE Cars and organizations are surprisingly similar. But, to understand this analogy, you must first learn how to understand an organization’s culture at three levels: artifacts, espoused beliefs and values, and basic underlying assumptions shared by group members (Schein, 2004). Like cars, organizations require fuel for power and a driver for ...