Organization Development Interventions: Executing Effective Organizational Change

To effectively adapt and thrive in today’s business world, organizations need to implement effective organizational development (OD) interventions to improve performance and effectiveness at the individual, group, and organizational levels. OD interventions involve people, trust, support, shared power, conflict resolution, and stakeholders’ participation, just to name a few. OD interventions usually have broader scope and can affect the whole organization. OD practitioners or change agents must have a solid understanding of different OD interventions to select the most appropriate one to fulfill the client’s needs. There is limited precise information or research about how to design OD interventions or how they can be expected to interact with organizational conditions to achieve specific results.

This book offers OD practitioners and change agents a step-by-step approach to implementing OD interventions and includes example cases, practical tools, and guidelines for different OD interventions. It is noteworthy that roughly 65% of organizational change projects fail. One reason for the failure is that the changes are not effectively implemented, and this book focuses on how to successfully implement organizational changes.

Designed for use by OD practitioners, management, and human resources professionals, this book provides readers with OD basic principles, practices, and skills by featuring illustrative case studies and useful tools. This book shows how OD professionals can actually get work done and what the step-by-step OD effort should be. This book looks at how to choose and implement a range of interventions at different levels. Unlike other books currently available on the market, this book goes beyond individual, group, and organizational levels of OD interventions, and addresses broader OD intervention efforts at industry and community levels, too. Essentially, this book provides a practical guide for OD interventions. Each chapter provides practical information about general OD interventions, supplies best practice examples and case studies, summarizes the results of best practices, provides at least one case scenario, and offers at least one relevant tool for practitioners.

William J. Rothwell, Ph.D., SPHR, SHRM-SCP, CPLP Fellow is a Professor in the Masters of Professional Studies in Organization Development and Change program and also in the Ph.D. program, Organization Development emphasis, of Workforce Education and Development at The Pennsylvania State University. He can be contacted by email at wjr9@psu.edu. He has authored, coauthored, edited or coedited 110 books since 1987. His recent books include Innovation Leadership (Routledge, 2018), Improving Human Performance, 3rd ed. (Routledge, 2018), Evaluating Organization Development: How to Ensure and Sustain the Successful Transformation (CRC Press, 2017), Marketing Organization Development Consulting: A How-To Guide for OD Consultants (CRC Press, 2017), Assessment and Diagnosis for Organization Development: Powerful Tools and Perspectives for the OD practitioner (CRC Press, 2017).

Sohel M. Imroz, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Human Resources Management at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University located in Daytona Beach, FL. He received the Ph.D. degree in Workforce Education and Development from Pennsylvania State University. He can be reached by email at imrozs@erau.edu.