Values of Organisational Development:

• Organisation constitutes various people, professionals, technocrats, researchers, managers and a host of other employees working in the organization contributing to the accomplishment of organizational objectives. They behave differently. Authority and power, conflicts, control take a backseat during the Organisational Development process.

Respect People:

• People are the heart, limbs and brain of the organization. They are responsible for creating opportunities for growth. They are the one who can act together to achieve organizational goals. Hence they must be treated with respect and dignity.

Confidence and Support:

• Trust among people is very important for the growth of the organization. A trust can only be created among people when they have confidence in each other and also support each other. Thus the people in the organization are to be believed and supported in order to have an effective organization.
• The healthy environment prevails when people are trusted and taken into confidence and necessary support is extended to them as and when needed.

Confrontation:

• In case of any confrontation or conflict should be dealt with openness without suppressing it. Suppression leads to dampening of morale.
• To avoid conflict or to get easy, earlier and amicable solution Identify the problem and its causes, discuss it openly with concerned people and find out a feasible solution. It boosts the morale of the employees and also creates a good environment.

Employee Participation:

• People react to how they are treated. The participation of employees who will get affected by the Organisational Development should be sought in decision-making. Hence any change can be implemented easily.

Seeking Cooperation:

• Managers should seek cooperation from each of the employees working under him in his department. This shows the democracy in the organization. The employees feel that their opinion also counts and hence they take part in organizational activities with vigour.
• It creates an atmosphere of cooperation and leads to organizational effectiveness. It also increases the willingness to accept the changes due to the organisation development process.

Expression:

• The organization gains from the differences in quality, ideas, opinions, outlook, and experiences of its people.  Human beings should be allowed to express their feelings and sentiments. This will result in building up high morale and the people will be motivated towards hard work ultimately resulting in increased efficiency.

Assumptions of Organisational Development:

• There are sets of assumptions, basic to most organization development activities, which relate to people as individuals, to people as group members and as leaders, and to people as members of the total organizational systems.
• All assumptions are based on premises that “People in the organization are the most valuable source available”

The Assumption About People as Individuals:

• Most Individuals have a drive towards personal growth and development. In an environment that is supportive and challenging, most people want to become most of what they are capable of becoming. In other words, individuals want personal growth and development, which can be attained in a supportive and challenging work situation.
• Most people are capable of making a higher level of contribution to organizational goals. A tremendous amount of constructive energy can be tapped if organizations recognize this. The implication of this assumption is that people are experts. Organizations must remove obstacles and barriers and reward success.
• What the manager should do:  ask, hear, support, challenge, encourage risk-taking, allow failure, remove barriers and obstacles, delegate authority and responsibility, set higher standards and reinforce success through rewards.
• Example: Asking for and acting on suggestions to solve problems.

The Assumption About People in Groups and About Leadership:

• The most psychologically relevant reference group for most people is the workgroup. It basically implies that what goes on in the work team, especially at the informal level, has great significance for feelings of satisfaction and competence.  Therefore, individual goals should be integrated with group goals.
• Most people wish to be accepted with at least one small reference group. This helps them greatly increase their effectiveness in helping their reference group to solve problems. Therefore, the growth of individual members is facilitated by relationships, which are open, supportive and trusting.
• Group members must assist each other with effective leadership and member behaviour. For a group to optimize its effectiveness, the formal leader cannot perform all the leadership and maintenance functions in all circumstances at all times and therefore assistance in leadership is required.
• Suppressed feelings and attitudes adversely affect problem-solving, personal growth and job satisfaction. The culture in most groups and organizations tends to suppress the expression of feelings and attitudes that people have about each other and their behaviours – both positive and negative – and about where their organizations are heading. If feelings are allowed to be expressed, it tends to open up many avenues for improved goal setting, leadership, communications, and conflict resolutions, problem-solving between the group, collaboration and morale. Attitudinal and motivational problems in organizations require interactive and transactional solutions. Such problems have the greatest chance of constructive solution if all parties in the system alter their mutual relationship, co-operation is always more effective than conflict.
• Level of interpersonal trust, support, and cooperation are much lower in most groups and organisation that is either desirable or necessary. Typically a number of forces contribute to such situations, including an absence of viewing feelings as important
  data, lack of group problem-solving skills, and leadership styles that reinforce dysfunctional competition.
• Solution to most attitudinal and motivational problems in organizations is transactional. Such problems have the greatest chance of constructive solution if all the parties in the system or subsystem alter their mutual relationship.
• What manager should do:  encourage to form work teams, give an opportunity to teams to flourish, replace one-on-one style with a leadership style, encourage active participation of members in problem-solving and decision making, provide substantial training, enable members to deal with both positive and negative feelings, encourage members to find solution to their problems through mutual interactions. The manager (the leader) must invest in teams or groups.

Assumptions About People in Organisational Systems:

• Traditional hierarchical forms of organizations are obsolete. Therefore, experimenting with new organizational structures and new forms of authority is imperative (very important/ essential). Creating cooperative rather than competitive organizational dynamics is a primary task of the organization.
• Win-lose conflict strategies are not optional in the long run to the solution of most organizational problems. Most organizations’ problems can better be approached in terms of “how can we all win?’’
• People are an organization’s most important resource. They are the source of productivity and profits and should be treated with care. An organization can achieve higher productivity only when the individual goals are integrated with organizational goals.
• What manager should do: Integrate individual goals are integrated with organizational goals

Other Assumptions:

• It takes time and patience, and the key movers in Organisational Development efforts need to have a relatively long-range time perspective.
• Improved performance from Organisational Development efforts need to be sustained – It can be done by bringing appropriate changes in the appraisal, compensation, training, staffing, task, and communication subsystems.

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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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