Four Trunk Stems of Organizational Development:

• Systematic organisation development activities are studied in an analogy of the mangrove tree, have at least four important trunk stems. One trunk stem consists of innovations in applying laboratory training insights to complex organizations. A second major stem is survey research and feedback methodology. Both stems are intertwined with a third, the emergence of action research. The fourth stem is the emergence of the (Tavistock) socio-technical and socio-clinical approaches. The key actors in these stems interact with each other and are influenced by experiences and concepts from many fields.

Laboratory Training Stem:

• Laboratory training, essentially unstructured small-group situations in which participants learn from their own actions and the group’s evolving dynamics. It began to develop about 1946 from various experiments in using discussion groups to achieve changes in behaviour in back-home situations.
•  The major contributions to this concept were from behavioural scientists Kurt Lewin followed by experts Robert Tannenbaum, Chris Argyris, Douglas Mc Gregor, Herbert Shepard, Robert Blake, Jane Mouton and Richard Beckhard.

Survey Research and Feedback Stem:

• It is the second major stem in the history of Organisation development. It involves a specialised form of organisation research. It revolves around the techniques and approach developed over a period of years by staff members at the Survey Research Center (SRC) of the University of Michigan.
• The results of this experimental study lend support to the idea that an intensive, group discussion procedure for utilizing the results of an employee questionnaire survey can be an effective tool for introducing positive change in a business organization.
• The effectiveness of these studies were more than the traditional training courses as it deals with the system of human relationships as a whole (superior and subordinate can change together) and it deals with each manager, supervisor, and an employee in the context of his own job, his own problems, and his own work relationships.
• The major contributors were Rensis Likert, Floydd Mann and others.

Action Research Stem:

• Action research is the third stem which is a collaborative, client consultant inquiry.
• Participant action research is used with the most frequency in OD. The laboratory training stem in the history of OD has a heavy component of action research; the survey feedback stem is the history of a specialized form of action research, and Tavistock projects have had a strong action research thrust.
• The scholars and practitioners who have invented and utilized action research in the evolution of OD were William F. Whyte and Hamilton. Kurt Lewin also conducted several experiments in the mid-1940s and early 1950s. This approach, today is as one of the most important methods for OD interventions in organisations.

Socio-Technical and Socio-clinical Stem:

• A fourth stem in the history of OD is the evolution of socio-clinical and sociotechnical approaches to helping groups and organizations. The socio-technical approach focussed on the non-executive ranks of organisations and especially the redesign of work.
• A group focus emerged early in the work of Tavistock in the context of family therapy in which the child and the parent received treatment simultaneously. The action research mode also emerged at Tavistock in attempts to give practical help to families, organizations, and communities.
• The major contributions were made by W.R. Bion, John Richman, Eric Trist and others.

Modern Development – Second Generation OD:

• In recent years, serious questioning has emerged about the relevance of OD to managing change in modern organisations. The need for “reinventing” the field has become a topic that even some of its “founding fathers” are discussing critically. Since the environment is becoming turbulent the context of OD has dramatically changed throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Practitioners and researchers are giving considerable attention to emerging concepts, interventions, and areas of application that might be called second-generation OD.
• Second generation OD, in particular, has a focus on organizational transformation. Organisation culture, Learning organisations, intensified interest in teams, Total Quality Management (TQM), Quality of work life, etc.
• Smith and Wilemon differentiate “incremental” change strategies and “fundamental” change strategies. Organizational transformation is seen as requiring more demands on top leadership, more visioning, more experimenting, more time, and the simultaneous management of many additional variables. Managed teams and cross-functional teams get started. In addition, as self-managed teams have assumed many functions previously performed by management, supervisors and middle managers have used team-building approaches within their own ranks to help reconceptualize their own roles.

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• An organization is a set up which brings together individuals from different backgrounds, of varied interests and specializations on a common platform for them to work as a single unit and achieve certain predefined goals.
• Katz, Kahn and Hanna see an organization as a system. An organization is an open system (in science open system is that system which can exchange both the matter and energy with the surroundings), of a biological type (it thas birth and can progress/regresses later on; can adapt to the environment). The concept of “system” indicates interdependence, interconnectedness, and interrelation between the elements of the organization and its external environment (surroundings).
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• Every system has an identifiable boundary that acts as an interface between the system and its environment. These boundaries are permeable, but most of the changes and activities take place within the system. Thus the system‟s activities are mostly internal, and its relations with the environment are a small fraction of the total process of change.
• An open system has goals and objectives that indicate the reasons for which that particular entity exists and functions. The outputs from the organization represent the most accurate reflection of its objectives, goals, and purposes.
• Every system is different from another, depending on its features, the type of environment, and on the system-environment relations, but are always influenced by the environment.
• In chemistry, it is said that the entropy (It is the degree of disorder or randomness in the system) of a system always increases. The increase in entropy results in chaos and may lead to the disintegration of the system. Thus it is management duty to keep the entropy under control.
• The feedback is important for any organization. Feedback is a response or the information that the system receives from its environment regarding its activities. It may be positive or negative.  The negative feedback measures the extent to which the output corresponds to the goals and objectives set. It is also known as feedback for correcting deviation. Positive feedback refers to the extent to which the goals and objectives correspond to the
  requirements of the environment.
• Systems are continuously dumped with very large amounts of information of which a part is useful, and another useless to the corresponding systems. A system should able to “encode” the useful information and to include it in its activities, and at the same time, to ignore the useless data.
• One other feature of the open system is the dynamic homeostasis (self-preserve). Homeostasis refers to stability, balance, or equilibrium in an organization.  The system reaches a certain state of equilibrium and tends to maintain it, against the inner or outer forces that attempt to change it.
• The features of the open system can clarify a lot of problems related to organizational change. Resistance to change may be explained by the systems‟ homeostatic nature, The death of organization is explained on the basis of negative entropy. The growth and a natural tendency of bureaucratization of organization can be explained on the basis of differentiation.

Organizational Development:

• External factors like changing customer attitudes, new legislation, and technological breakthrough cause an organization to change. Thus the organization should not be static. Many times these changes are forced upon, while in some cases the organization undergoes change internally and inherently. The external environment is changing continuously and at a rapid pace. Hence the organization has to change itself continuously. The modern manager must be flexible and adaptive in a changing environment and should able to diagnose the implication of the changes. Organisational Development (OD) is a management discipline which uses behavioural sciences to help organisations adapt to these changes.
• Organisational Development (OD) is a planned approach to improve employee and organisational effectiveness. This can be achieved by conscious interventions in those processes and structures that have an immediate bearing on the human aspects of the organisation.
• Beckhard (1969), defines Organisational Development as “it is an effort planned, organisation wide, and managed from the top to increase organisation effectiveness and health through planned interventions in the organisations “processes” using behavioural science knowledge”.
  Bennis (1969), defines Organisational Development as “It is a response to change, a complex educational strategy intended to change the beliefs, attitudes, values, and structure of organisations so that they can better adapt to new technologies, markets, and challenges, and the dizzying rate of change itself”.
• French & Bell, (1978) describes Organisational Development as “In the behavioural science and perhaps ideal, sense of the term, organisation development is a long-range effort to improve an organisations problem- solving and renewal process. This is done particularly through more effective and collaborative management of organisation culture. Special emphasis is laid on the culture of formal work teams – with the assistance of a change agent, or catalyst, and use of the theory and technologies of applied behavioural science, including action research.”
• Cummings and Worley (1997) define Organisational Development as “A system-wide application of the knowledge of behavioural science to planned development and reinforcement of organisational strategies, structures and processes aimed at improving organisations’ effectiveness.”
• Organisational Development includes methodologies and approaches to strategic planning, organisation design, leadership development, change and performance management, coaching, diversity and work-life balance.
• From the above definitions, we can conclude that Organisational Development is a collection of methodology and various procedures to increase the productivity and effectiveness of an organization. It is a change process designed to bring about a particular kind of end result.

The Significance of Definition of Organisational Development:

• It focuses on culture and processes.
• It focuses on the human and social side of the organisation.
• It realizes on the action research model with extensive participation by client system participation.
• It takes a developmental view that aims at the betterment of both individual and the organisation i.e., “win-win” solutions.
• It encourages the involvement and participation by all the level of organisation in the problem-solving and decision-making.

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