Chapter 17 Organizational development

Our review of the field of Organizational Development (OD) reveals an extensive range of tools which attempt to help organizations improve performance. We believe that OD should be studied differently: As a continuous process of change-making or innovation. How this innovation process enables organizations to achieve both social and economic outcomes simultaneously with fewer trade-offs is explained and modeled. The innovation process is a continuous flow beginning with engaging employees in proactively seeking problems inside and outside the organization as possibilities for valuable new changes. This is called problem finding and is followed by problem defining, solving, and implementing. Individual and team cognitive skills and styles that enable the innovation process are described. The innovation process is integrated into classic organizational effectiveness research requiring mastery of both efficiency and adaptability performance. Finally, the effects of the innovation process on performance, motivation, and strategy are discussed.