Based on experience in a group facilitation, this chapter offers a sociological perspective for the understanding of behavior in T-groups. The proposed perspective rests on Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of habitus (social dispositions) and the relational. It is argued that by using therapeutic discourse and practices aimed at developing personal skills and abilities and shaping behavior, the T-group very often hardly represents the role of social and structural aspects in generating participants' behavior. In response to this shortcoming, the chapter shows how habitus and the relational perspective enable a group facilitator to expose the relationship between the group's social and structural context and personal behavior. The aim in this article is therefore to propose using Bourdieu's habitus and relational perspective as organizing concepts for the understanding the behavior of T-groups participants.
At the core of the capability to develop and change beyond incremental improvements lie a large number of decisions, where support of the established organizational modus operandi is weighed against investments in something new or different. The top management team is regularly charged with the most important of these decisions, and hence needs mastery of this capability, which commonly is called contextual ambidexterity. Multiple studies suggest that this is the case, but few explore the roots of this capability. In this exploratory multilevel case study, we search the micro-foundations of ambidexterity and study how subjective, individual values can affect the team efficiency in engaging in exploitive and explorative issues as well as their ability to be able to manage both. Moreover, this chapter discusses how the value palette in a management team can be influenced to enact such ambidextrous capability.
Organization development (OD) is an applied behavioral, organizational, and social science. It is therefore a field of both scholarship and practice. Over the decades of the development of the field since the 1940s, different elements of scholarship and practice have emerged separately, leading to the fragmentation of a field that is meant to take a system-wide view of all forms of organizations into which OD scholars and practitioners intervene. The authors are scholar–practitioners who research and teach in the field. In the process, we have experienced the divergence of the field in that whether teaching in the classroom or building the capacity of mentees who are internal or external consultants, a variety of divergent sources are required to share a holistic picture of the knowledge required to build OD consulting practice skillsets. This chapter presents such an integrated OD consulting model that attempts to close this gap.
Despite decades of evolution, organization development (OD) is still severely challenged when it comes to dealing with some of the most vexing organizational and societal issues we currently face. In part, this is because the issues we face are sociotechnical in nature, requiring closer collaboration between social scientists and those possessing the technical expertise required to achieve breakthroughs. As we learn more about the promises and risks of Artificial Intelligence (AI), we explore how the application of this new technology and the continued evolution of OD methods could merge to produce a more complex and intelligent form of OD to deal with the most important challenges of our times.
Organizations and society are experiencing ongoing disruption as digitalization evolves and the capabilities of digital technology become increasingly entrenched in our institutions, work, and lives. Exponential disruption stems in large part from the technology's inherent generativity and the ease with which it creates boundary transcending connections. Digital technologies promise and provide broad benefits, including customization, agility, transparency, efficiency, and empowerment. At the same time, they present organizations with a complex adaptive challenge: if the emerging social system is not guided by a future vision where technical rationality and human purpose are considered together, traditional assumptions of hierarchical control and technological determinism will overwhelm human agency. We describe and discuss the learnings from a ten-company design lab convened to increase understanding of the practical impacts and implications of digitalization on the design of their organizations and generate actionable knowledge to address the challenges inherent in this transition. Participants came to recognize the need to design digitally enabled organizations based on a new set of assumptions consistent with both technological possibilities and human aspirations. Their work generated preliminary design specifications and implications for the process of redesign and change.
Organizations today face complex, multidimensional challenges requiring collaborative approaches to address shared societal issues. This study explores inter-organizational collaboration within the third-sector voluntary organization field, specifically Italian Patient Advocacy Associations (PAAs), emphasizing the transition from competitive to collaborative dynamics. Through a year-long action research process, we examine and discuss how psychosocial and organizational dynamics enable innovative collective responses and effective collaboration. Specifically, the paper focuses on forming identity awareness, managing diversities and conflict, managing boundaries, structuring and managing shared projects. By fostering trust and shared projects, PAAs can leverage collaboration to overcome resource constraints and amplify advocacy impact. The discussion also analyzes the dynamic role of the researcher, showcasing how adopting different functions to guide the evolutionary process is critical. The findings contribute to understanding inter-organizational processes, offering practical insights to enhance collaboration in third-sector organizations.
Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) is emerging as a transformative general-purpose technology with significant societal implications, pressing higher education institutions to integrate critical AI literacy into staff and student development. However, the approach to developing and implementing such literacy in business schools remains a topic of ongoing debate. Using insider action research (IAR) in a process of planned change management, this study explores an AI transformation initiative at a leading European business school, identifying the mechanisms that effectively contribute to, and impede critical AI literacy development. Through abductive analysis, the research study elucidates the value of developing critical AI literacy through infusing interiority in an action research (AR) framework with “interiority,” denoting the integration of theoretical, practical, and relational knowing toward enhanced intellectual self-awareness and self-empowerment. The study contributes by offering an interiority-infused AR framework as a conceptual tool to guide the development of AI transformation initiatives leading to critical AI literacy.
For over 70 years, Edgar H. Schein creatively and systematically shaped and advanced theory and practice in areas such as organization development and change, career dynamics, the cultural dynamics of complex systems, leadership, process consultation (PC), and the clinical inquiry/research paradigm. This reflective chapter is built around Schein's foundational theme of the scholar–practitioner. As such, it explores the impact of his work on the scholar–practitioner as artist, PC and Bourdieu's notion of habitus, the role of context and collaborative design dimensions (CDD) in relationships, psychological safety and organizational culture, humble inquiry, and the role that social scientists play in confronting global crises. Trajectories of broad areas for future explorations are discussed.
A scholarly collaborative partnership is a capability that develops over time. Its quality is an outcome of the collaborative context, the alignment of purpose, development of work and learning processes, development of shared language and success stories. In this chapter, the authors engage in a metalogue where their shared reflection on the formation and development of their collaborative scholarship in the field of organization development and change is itself an instance of a process of shared scholarship. By adopting the format of a metalogue, they provide the voices of their individual thinking and their reflective conversation so as to offer an expression of the process of theorizing to scholars who wish to embark upon or study shared scholarship.
Organization change (OC) is increasingly important in today's volatile world. Understanding OC is a growing emphasis of management and organization (M&O) research and the singular focus of OC scholarship and practice. We show how selected M&O theories inform OC at the organization level. These theoretical perspectives diverge on issues central to OC. We explore what these conceptual differences mean for OC study and practice going forward.
Reflecting on 25 years of collaborating in action learning research initiatives in interorganizational settings, the authors have framed three key theoretical contributions: (1) a formula for action learning in networks, (2) the notion of action learning research, and (3) the application of action learning research in networks. This chapter reviews how each of these three key theoretical contributions emerged as insights and were developed over time through three large-scale funded interorganizational action learning projects. The chapter provides insights into the process of theorizing as the authors show how these frameworks emerged through inquiry into experience and were consolidated through collaborative action as practice-based research, research as practice, and practice as research toward designed-in impact.
This chapter presents a theory for developing an adaptive high commitment, high performance system of organizing, managing, and leading. It is a synthesis of my 50 years of action and field research presented in my books and articles. It operationalized and makes actionable the ideas of Lewin and systems theorists. Its features are three organizational outcomes that must be achieved simultaneously, features of the system that must be targeted for change, six silent barriers to change, a governance system for continuous learning, change in large complex systems, and elements of a system that needed to immunize it against ultimate destruction.
This chapter traces the author's journey of change research from positivism to pragmatism and how different types of “engaged scholarship” shape how we know and do change. It takes readers through the ontology, epistemology, and methodology of different types of research and how these were expressed in studies of planned change interventions, mergers and acquisitions (M&A), cynicism and its consequences, “soul work” and community building in business, organizational transformation, and the development of more socially and environmentally conscious people, purposes, and practices. The paper reflects on the author's research as it relates to regulatory versus radical change and whose interests are and might be served by change research.
Health-care systems currently face great challenges, including an increasing elderly population. To respond to this problem, a hospital emergency department, three municipalities, and self-employed general practitioners in Denmark decided to collaborate with the aim of reorganizing treatment of elderly acute ill patients. By establishing a small-scale collaborative community and through an action research process, we show, how to jointly explore and develop a new organization design for in-home hospital treatment that enables the health professionals to collaborate in new ways, and at the same time to investigate and improve this cocreation process and codesign of knowledge among multiple different stakeholders.
Organization development (OD) and people analytics (PA) have developed and are typically practiced as entirely separate and nonoverlapping disciplines in organizations. We review the principles underlying each of the two disciplines and show much greater overlap and similarities than commonly believed. An integrated framework is provided, along with examples of OD tools that should be part of the PA toolkit for any practitioner. Case studies of what the integrated framework looks like when applied in practice are discussed.
