Organization Development: Monitoring and Changing Culture and Behavior
Exam 16/1/25
• Exam literature
o All lecture slides and content of lectures
o Book chapters
o 12 articles
• Extra information
o Exam is 50% of grape
o It’s a multiple choice test
o Exam is 16/1/25, 13:30-16:00
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,Lecture 14/11
Course and lecture overview → how topics are interrelated
Organisation Development → planned process of change in an organization’s culture through the
utilization of behavioral science, research and theory
• Another definition → OD is a long-range effort to improve an organization’s problem-
solving capabilities and ability to cope with change in its external environment, with the
help of external or internal behavioral-scientist consultants (change agents)
• You are doing OD if you are…
o Bringing planned change to align the structure, culture, strategy and individual
jobs of people in an entire organisation (not accidental)
o Applying behavioral science knowledge to diagnose, to facilitate and to evaluate
organisational change (evidence-based)
o Analyzing the effectiveness of an organisation and how to improve that by
involving members of the organisation (interviews, focus groups): gather
evidence on the change needed and the course to take (not intuitive)
o Supporting increase of organisational effectiveness on all levels (high quality and
productivity, financial performance, optimizing teamwork, improving well-
being/health of workers)
o Facilitating organisations’ response to change in a flexible, adaptive and often
participative way
o Developing sustainable change that is continues (not tactics or short-term)
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, • Why do organisations need continuous development?
o General and task (specific) environment
o Orange → indirectlt influence the company
o Colors inside → directly influence the company
• Important trends in the general environment
o Economic → globalization
o Demographic → diversification of labour force
o Technological → IT revolution and AI, more
automation
o Political/legal → tightened (financial)
supervision, governmental changes (taxes,
regulations)
o Sociocultural → increased focus on Corporate
Social Responsibility (people, planet, profit)
• 88% of Fortune 500 firms that existed in 1955 are gone → three companies that failed to
adapt and why
o Kodak → did not anticipate digital camera → success trap: exploiting what has
been historically working → outperformed by competitors such as Canon
o Toys R us → missed opportunity to develop e-commerce → only kept physical
stores (outperformed by online companies like Amazon)
o General Motors → activists started pointing out that Hummer was worst car to
drive environmentally → eco-friendly alternatives were brought to marked (Tesla)
Types of change
1. Magnitude of change → incremental vs fundamental
a. E.g. you go from old school phones to iphone
b. Iphone was way more fundamental or bigger
2. Degree of organisation → overorganized ‘loosen up’ vs
underorganized ‘tighten up’
a. Many rules or no rules at all in an organisation
3. Setting of change → local vs global
a. Globalisation, so environment becomes
bigger
Models of Planned Change → see figure
1. Lewin’s Planned Change Model
2. Action Research Model
3. Positive Model
a. Main difference → second and third model are
circulative, it’s rather reciprocative
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, Most important to diagnose what needs to
be changed → diagnosing change: an open
systems model → key aspect of course
• Alignment → if organisatoin has
strong ideas about being eco-
friendly, but they don’t make it easy
for people to do so, they haven’t
align the organisational and
personal needs → there needs to be
higher overlap with culture/higher
management, all the way down to
individual employees
• Boundaries → what parts of the organisation are you actually changing
Organizational culture → blanket above diagnosing change model →
culture is the pattern of artifacts, norms, values and basic
assumptions which describes how the organisation solves problems
and teaches newcomers how to behave
• You diagnose the organisational culture
• Organisational culture → onion model
• Artifacts → visible components of culture
o You can observe it
o E.g. how people talk, dress, what the building looks
like, werkpleinen or individual offices
• Norms → unwritten rules of organisation
o E.g. open door policy
• Values → ideas how people should behave, what organisation should look like
• Basic assumptions → how people are in general, what kind of people do you hire?
o E.g. people are inherently prosocial, helpful, attentive, calm
• Think of it as an iceberg → many things you can’t see from the outside
Why study culture?
• It’s predictive of…
o Financial performance of organisations
o Employee well-being
o Organizational effectiveness
o Innovation
• And more important than formal control systems, procedures, structure and strategy
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