Article Analysis and Synthesis - Understanding Yourself as an Instrument of Change. Jean Bartunek

Organizational development is a very significant course of action. This development acknowledges the challenges and the growth of an organization. Organizational development involves the arrangement and incorporation of various organizational activities and enhancing the current procedures of accomplishing various tasks throughout the community.

Cummings, T. G.; and Worley, C. G. (2015). Organization Development and Change, (10th Ed). Mason, OH. Cengage Learning.

There are ten scholarly, peer-reviewed research articles selected for the preliminary literature review and they are summarized below. The relevance of the articles and the research findings, research design and methods are included below.

The discussion briefly describes the results, but it failed to restate the purpose of the study. It discusses the results with many new citations that had not been provided in the introduction. It discussed future research implications but not in great detail. One of the greater strengths of the discussion was that it discussed multiple implications for professionals to consider. Additionally, the limitations and strengths of the study were discussed in detail.

In this article we can see that different disciplines can be combined for a more effective organization development and management change of thinking.

Organisation Development is about ensuring the organisation has a committed ‘ft for the future’ workforce required to deliver strategic ambitions. It plays a vital role to ensure that the organisation culture, values and environment support and enhance organisation performance and adaptability. It also provides insight and leadership on development and execution of any capability; cultural and change activities.

For example, when an OD practitioner is looking at the inputs, he/she is looking at how the greater organization impacts the group. For example, Worley and Cummings (2015) state that organization design and culture are the two primary inputs to group design (p. 107). However, when looking at the outputs of the group-level, the OD practitioner is a lot closer to the individual than if he/she were working strictly on the organization-level. For example, one of the primary measurements of effective groups is assessing the quality of the work life for the group

Zoltan 's seems to show favoritism towards members of the OD group. The decision to place the OD program under the human resources department

The understanding I now have of Organization Development came at a point in which I was personally experiencing it myself. As someone who has undergone a reduction in work force, this course helped me better understand why transitions happen in a company that is going through an economical or global change. As someone who has worked for over 30 years, I experienced this for the first time ever in my life. I did not quite know the gest of what it all meant because I did not have an understanding regarding

Argyris, Chris and Donald Schön (1975). Theory In Practice: Increasing Professional Effectiveness. San Francisco: JosseyBass. Argyris, C., & Schön, D. (1978) Organizational Learning: A Theory of Action Perspective, Reading, Mass: Addison Wesley.

The concept of learning organization emerged in the late 80’s proposed by Boydell, Pedler and Burgoyne (1989). However, it was only in the 1990s that learning organization became a common concept in organization theory. The learning organization concept attained broad popularity when Senge published his bestselling The Fifth Discipline: the art and practice of learning organization, in 1990.

Organization development grew out of the human relations traditions of the 1940s and 1950s, and it has had enormous influence on management practices and thinking about how organizational effectiveness can be achieved. Critical manpower and resource shortages faced by all organizations, public and private, during World War II and in the immediate post-war years stimulated a search by social scientist and managers, separately and in cooperation with one another, for effective means to maximize the utilization of existing individual and organizational resources. (Ritcher, I 2007). Organization Development was by tradition about planned change efforts, instituted to enhance organization effectiveness within the context of the traditional, hierarchical, management-as-experts, top-down era. The legacy of leaders and organizations developed in this context remain. Organizational Development is about how organizations and people function and how to get them to function better. Organization transformation signals the need to transform mindsets, engage people and make the deep shift to the ongoing mutual learning environment needed for the long-lasting change characteristic of our world today.

Organizational Development (OD) is a developing discipline that draws on knowledge and methods from the behavioral sciences. The goal of OD is to enhance organizational effectiveness through planned systemic change. These cases study provide students with the discipline's defining conceptual frameworks and the technologies used in x organizational development. Greater emphasis is on understanding the relationship between the OD practitioner's (like Colgate-Palmolive and Marks & Spencer) role and key players in the clients system as the OD cycle unfolds. Students would experience the practitioner's "mind set" as they are challenged to frame organizational issues and identify how to enter and intervene in dynamic organizational settings.

The title of the article gives a slight insinuation that organization development is not appreciated as much as it should be embraced by those who could benefit from its services. According to the authors, there are four areas that seem to be viewed as divergent. Oxford Dictionaries, defines divergent as “Tending to be different or develop in different directions” (divergent: definition of divergent in Oxford dictionary (American English) (US), n.d.). Therefore, instead of viewing these OD processes as divisive or multidirectional, it is also possible to view them as complimentary. These four areas are: “development versus change, episodic versus continuous change, planned versus emergent change, and diagnostic versus dialogic OD” (Cummings, T. & Cummings, C., 2014, p. 141). Viewing OD techniques in new or more correct ways that would enhance its processes and perception is of benefit to not only the practitioner, but also its clients. OD’s desire is to make clear its intentions to be socially, economically, and humanistically sound as a discipline.

Koontz and Weihrich (1990) Organizational development as well as management coincide with one another. Organizational development seeks to offer a systematic process of identifying and solving problems as they occur over time. However, the greatest tasks of organizational developments are determining what techniques to use to make sure the organization continues to improve while fueling the growth of the organization (Koontz & Weihrich, 1990).