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.
