1. The Organization
Development
Practitioner

2. Who is the OD Practitioner?
O They may be internal or external consultants
who offer professional services to
organizations, including their top managers,
functional department heads, and staff
groups.
O They may be those specializing in fields
related to OD, such as reward systems,
organization design, total quality,
information technology, and business
strategy.

3. Who is the OD Practitioner?
O The increasing number of managers and
administrators who have gained
competence in OD and who apply it to their
own work areas.

4. Competencies of
an Effective OD
Practitioner
KNOWLEDGE AND SKILLS

5. Foundation Competencies
O Intrapersonal Skills
O Conceptual and analytical ability
O Integrity
O Personal Centering
O Active learning skills
O Personal stress mgt.
O Entrepreneurial skills

6. O Interpersonal Skills
O Listening
O Establishing trust and rapport
O Giving and receiving feedback
O Negotiation skills
O Counseling and coaching
O General Consultation Skills
O Organizational diagnosis
O Designing and executing an intervention

7. O Organization Development Theory
O Planned change
O Action research model
O Contemporary approaches to managing
change
O Assessing and institutionalizing change
programs

8. Role of Organization
Development Professionals
O Position
O Internal and External Consultants
O Marginality
O Use of Knowledge and Experience

9. The Organization
Development
Practitioner
Professional Values

10. O Traditionally, OD practitioners have promoted a set of
values under a humanistic framework including a
concern for inquiry and science, democracy, and
being helpful. They have sought to build trust and
collaboration; to create an open, problem-solving
climate; and to increase the self-control of
organization members.
O More recently, they have extended those values to
include a concern for improving organizational
effectiveness and performance. They have shown an
increasing desire to optimize both human benefits
and production objectives.

11. O In addition to value issues within organizations, OD
practitioners are dealing more and more with value
conflicts with powerful outside groups. Organizations
are open systems and exist within increasingly
turbulent environments. Those external groups often
have different and competing values for judging the
organization’s effectiveness.
O Practitioners must have not only social skills but also
political skills, They must understand the distribution
of power, conflicts of interest, and value dilemmas
inherent in managing external relationships, and be
able to manage their own role and values with
respect to those dynamics.

12. O Interventions promoting collaboration and system
maintenance may be ineffective in a larger arena,
especially when there are power and dominance
relationships among organizations and competition
for scarce resources. Under those conditions, they
may need more power-oriented interventions, such
as bargaining, coalition forming, and pressure
tactics.

13. The Organization
Development
Practitioner
Professional Ethics

14. O Ethical issues in OD are concerned with how
practitioners perform their helping relationship with
organization members. Inherent in any helping
relationship is the potential for misconduct and client
abuse. OD practitioners can let personal values
stand in the way of good practice or use the power
inherent in their professional role to abuse (often
unintentionally) organization members.

15. O Ethical Guidelines
O Ethical Dilemmas
O Misrepresentation
O Misuse of Data
O Coercion
O Value and Goal Conflict
O Technical Ineptness