Richard W. Woodman

Studying Organizational Change and Development: Challenges for Future Research

This article presents several studies that examine organizational change. The authors note that certain issues should be addressed when examining the studies including an examination of the multiple contexts and levels of analysis in studying organizational change, the inclusion of time, history, process and action, the link between change processes and organizational performance, the investigation of international and cross-cultural comparisons, the study of receptivity, customization, sequencing, pace and episodic versus continuous change and the partnership between scholars and practitioners in studying change. The authors discuss how these issues are related to the concepts in the studies and note their research has not addressed these issues at this point in time.

Understanding Organizational Change: A Schematic Perspective

The construct of change schema is developed and its possible dimensions explained. Using data from two samples and both quantitative and qualitative methods, we found that locus of control and orga...

Organizational Change and Development: New Arenas for Inquiry and Action

The purpose of this review is to identify and explore new arenas of inquiry and action in the organizational change and development field. Recent developments are examined in seven categories: (a) refinement of change theories, (b) developments in research methodologies, (c) a new emphasis on strategic issues including strategic leadership and organizational transformation, (d) the role of OD in multinational firms, (e) development of the organizational culture construct, (f) the development and use of high performance-high commitment work systems, and (g) the use of OD approaches in social movements. Based on developments in these areas, the argument is advanced that the field is currently characterized by a renewed focus on changing whole systems and a wide breadth of progress cutting across theory, method, and practice.

Individual Differences in Creativity

Creativity seems to be one of those concepts understood by everyone in the world except behavioral scientists. Although some segments of the public might hypothesize other reasons for this state of affairs, we believe the reason for this seeming paradox is as simple as the difference between the terms concept and construct. As a concept used by laypersons, creativity carries meaning in everyday speech that, although somewhat imprecise, is nevertheless widely shared; any surplus meaning is relatively unimportant; and operationalization for measurement purposes is a nonissue. As a scientific construct, however, creativity is held to a higher (or, at least, different) standard, and the construct validity issues surrounding the term can be frustrating in the extreme for researchers interested in investigating the phenomena of creative behavior and creative persons.

Effects of Perceived Organizational Factors on Role Stress-Job Attitude Relationships:

The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of two per-ceived organizational indicants-psychological climate and percep-tions of the management control system-on the often-studied rela-tionships of role conflict and ambiguity with job satisfaction and intentions to change jobs. Based on a cross-sectional survey of 423 marketing professionals, it was determined that these two perceived organizationalfactors predominantly accountedfor the shared varia-bility inherent in the relationships considered and in certain instances resulted in a change in the direction of the correlation. In particular, the relationships of role conflict and ambiguity with pay and promo-tion satisfaction and with turnover intentions were the most heavily af-fected ones. The relationships of role ambiguity with overall satisfac-tion and with work itself were also affected. Falsification analyses revealed that the findings hold across various sample segments and that role perceptions and job attitudes are directly tied to perceptions about the broader organization. The implications and research direc-tions of these results for the study of role stress correlates are consid-ered.

An Investigation of Positive-Findings Bias in Evaluation of Organization Development Interventions

This study investigated the possibility of an inverse relationship between methodological rigor and positive results from organization development (OD) interventions in OD evaluations published bet...

Effects of Team Development Intervention: A Field Experiment

A team development intervention was conducted with 22 three- and four-person work groups from an engineering survey course. For comparison purposes, 22 work groups from the surveying course served as controls and an additional 23 groups were observed to measure any possible Hawthorne effect. Random assignment of subjects to groups and groups to conditions resulted in a post-test-only control group experimental design. The major findings were: 1. Work groups experiencing team development did not perform better than controls. 2. Individuals in groups receiving team development perceived their group as being more effective and reported greater participation than members of control groups. 3. There was a nonsignificant tendency for individuals in groups receiving team development to express greater agreement on group goals. 4. There were no statistically significant differences between individuals in treatment and control groups in terms of: (a) perceived learning, (b) expressed satisfaction with group performance, or (c) expressed satisfaction with the group.

Managers' Recognition of Employees' Creative Ideas: A Social-Cognitive Model

Abstract: The recognition and support of employee creative ideas is a crucial component in organizational creativity. In this paper, we explore a social-cognitive approach to explaining the conditions under which a manager is likely to consider an employee idea as creative. Our model posits that the managers ‘creativity schema’ dictates recognition of creative ideas in the work setting. This creativity schema is influenced by personal characteristics of the manager, by aspects of the managers relationship with the employee, and by a number of organizational influences. Implications of this approach for research and for practice are discussed.

Discourse, Metaphor and Organizational Change: the Wine is New, but the Bottle is Old

I have been invited to comment on two papers printed in this issue of the British Journal of Management (‘Organizational discourse and new organization development practices’ by Bob Marshak and David Grant; ‘Organizational change and the importance of embedded assumptions’ by Ian Palmer and Richard Dunford) and I am delighted to do so as each addresses issues fundamental to continued progress in the field of organizational change. Ideas and theory exist in a marketplace in the organizational sciences. Ideas and theory that add value will persist and develop; those that do not will eventually be replaced by more promising ideas and more valid theory. Each of these papers enters the marketplace of ideas threatening to overturn some aspects of conventional wisdom. I reflect on these papers from the perspective of examining the potential impact of the emerging field of organizational discourse on the field of organization development (OD) and the broader field of organizational change. When confronted with new ideas, a common expression is to describe them (the ideas) as ‘old wine in new bottles’. This is sometimes said sneeringly, as a way of protecting one’s favoured ‘old’ theory or idea and going on the offensive to discount the potential value of the new idea – to dramatically point out that the idea is ‘old wine’ simply dressed up with some new or different framework, typology, language or whatever. There is sometimes wisdom in this scepticism. Human beings do tend to recycle venerable truths or ideas and play with them from new perspectives (not that this is bad, per se, of course). Parsimony in science means, among other things, that scientists need to avoid developing new explanatory constructs when established and validly measured constructs already exist that contain the explanatory variance of interest. Parsimony suggests that we should prefer the more simple explanation (theory) to the more complex explanation when and if the simpler explanation is valid. Parsimony also means that we should avoid using some complex, sophisticated statistical analysis when, for example, all that is needed to test a hypothesis is a bivariate correlation coefficient. And, by extension, parsimony implies that we avoid adding to the complexity of our research methodology when more straightforward ways of investigating some phenomenon of interest exist. And so on. The organizational sciences have been accused of sometimes lacking parsimony in the above ways (that’s my major understatement of this paper), so perhaps we are wise to question the parsimony of any new theory, new methodology or new way of investigating organizational functioning and behaviour. In the case of organizational discourse and its potential contribution to the change and development arena, however, I suggest that the reverse of the ‘old wine in new bottles’ notion is more accurate. I think we are clearly dealing with some ‘new wine’ here. At the same time, the fundamental problems of organizing being addressed remain, as well as some time-honoured notions about how to theorize about these dynamics and

The Current Practice of Organization Development within the Firm: A Survey of Large Industrial Corporations

The 500 largest industrial firms in the United States were surveyed with regard to their internal organization development (OD) activities. Usable data were obtained from 110 of these organizations, including 61 of the largest 200 firms. Survey results are presented and implications of these results are discussed.