OD INTERVENTIONS

It refers to various activities which consultant and client organisation perform for improving organisational functioning through enabling organisation members. FRENCH & BELL have defined OD Interventions, “as a set of structured activities in which selected organisation units engaged with the task or sequence of task where the task goals are related directly or indirectly to organisation improvement”

OD interventions that are targeted toward individuals, skills training, job redesign, role negotiation and career planning.

Sensitivity Training: Also called T- group training or laboratory training, sensitivity training is designed to help individuals understand how their behaviour affects others. Members are is brought together in a free open environment in which participants discuss themselves. The discussion is loosely directed by a professional behavioural scientist called “facilitator”. The facilitator intervenes only to help move the group forward. The objective of sensitivity training is to increase sensitivity toward others. The outcome of such training should, therefore, help employees understand others better, become aware of their own feelings and perceptions, and improve communication.

Skill Training :  Skill training refers to increasing the job knowledge, skills, and abilities that are necessary to do a job effectively. Skill training is aroused due to the rapid changes that organisations face. The job knowledge, therefore, needs to be continuously updated to keep pace with rapid change. The objective of training is to enable a worker to be more effective on the job. For example, while new workers can be trained to achieve levels of output attained by experienced older workers, existing workers can be retained to improve their output at par.

Job redesign : As an OD interventions, job redesign alters jobs to improve the fit between individual skills and the demands of the job. We have already discussed job redesign in chapter 10. examples of job design interventions include job enlargement, job enrichment, job realigning task demands and individual capabilities, or for redesigning jobs to fit new techniques or organisation structures better.

Role negotiation : Sometimes, group members have differing expectations of one another within the working relationship. Role negotiation is a simple technique whereby individuals meet and clarify their psychological contract. In doing this, the expectations of each party are clarified and negotiated. The outcome of role negotiation is improved understanding between the members.

Career Planning: Career Planning refers to matching an individual’s career aspirations with the opportunities available in the organisation. In other words, it involves activities offered by the organisation to individuals to identify strength, weaknesses, specific goals and they would like to occupy. Career planning activities benefit both 3/4 individual and organisations. Counseling sessions are held to help employees identify their skills and deficiencies in their skills. The organisation then can plan its training and development programmes based on this information to improve individual’s skills required for assuming higher responsibilities. Such a  process may help the organisation identify and also nurture the talented employees for potential promotion.

Management Development Training : Management development encompasses a host of techniques designed to enhance a manager’s skills on the job. Training for management development generally focuses on four types of learning : verbal information, intellectual skills, attitudes, and development is through the use of action learning, an integration of classroom learning with on-the-job experiences. Action learning enables managers to know about themselves through the challengers of comrades. Simulation, business games, role playing, and case studies are other techniques that provide active learning for the participants.

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Approaches To The Study Of Organisational Behaviour

The four approaches are – human resources approach, productivity approach, and systems approach. These are examined in the following paragraphs, it may be stated that all these approaches are interwoven .

 Human Resources Approach This approach recognizes the fact that people are the central resource in any organisation and that they should be developed towards higher levels of competency, creativity and fulfillment. People thus developed will contribute to the success of the organisation. The human resources approach is also called as the supportive approach in the sense that he manager’s role changes from control of employee to active support of their growth and performance. The supportive approach contrasts with the traditional management approach. In the traditional approach managers decided what employees should do and closely monitored their performance to ensure task accomplishment. In the human resources approach, role of managers changes, as was stated above, from structuring and controlling to supporting.
Contingency Approach The contingency approach (sometimes called the situational approach) is based on the premise that methods or behaviours which work effectively in one situation fail in another. OD programmes, for example, way work brilliantly in one situation but fail miserably in another situation. Results differ because situations differ, the manager’s task, therefore, is to identity which method will, in a particular situation, under particular circumstances, and at a particular time, best contribute to the attainment of organisation’s goals. The strength of the contingency approach lies in the fact it encourages analysis of each situation prior to action while at the same time discourages habitual practice of universal assumptions about methods and people. The contingency approach is also more interdisciplinary, more system – oriented and more research-oriented than14 in any other approach.

Productivity Approach Productivity which is the ratio of output to input, is a measure of an organisation’s effectiveness. It also reveals manager’s efficiency in optimizing resource utilization. The higher the numerical value of this ratio, the greater the efficiency. Productivity is generally measured in terms of economic inputs and outputs, but human and social inputs and outputs also are important. For example, if better organisational behaviour can improve job satisfaction, a human output or benefit occurs. In the same manner, when employee development programmes lead to a by product of better citizens in a community, a valuable social output occurs. Organisational behaviour decisions typically involve human, social, and / or economic issues, and so productivity usually a significant part of these decisions is recognized and discusses extensively in the literature on OB.

Systems Approach Systems approach to OB views the organisation as a united, purposeful system composed of interrelated parts. This approach gives managers a way of looking at the organisation as a whole, whole person, whole group, and the whole social system. In so doing, systems approach tells us that the activity of any segment of an organisation affects, in varying degrees the activity of every other segment. A systems view should be the concern of every person in an organisation. The clerk at a service counter, the machinist, and the man-ager-all work with the people and thereby influence the behavioural quality of life in an organisation and its inputs. Managers, however, tend to have larger responsibility, because they are the ones who make majority are people-oriented. The role of managers, then, is to use organisational behaviour to help build an organisation culture in which talents are utilized and further developed, people are motivated, teams become productive, organisations achieve their goals and society reaps the reward.