Research in Organizational Change and Development: Volume 29

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.

Laboratories or “labs” outside science and technology have become increasingly popular in recent years. Their proliferation raises questions about what they have in common and the extent to which “lab” as a metaphor is still pertinent. We develop six criteria to assess these types of labs: (1) theoretical foundations; (2) experimentation; (3) collaboration; (4) boundaries; (5) governance; and (6) temporality. We identify a number of paradoxes in the operation of labs and explore their implications for research and practice.

The digital transformation calls for new thinking about sociotechnical systems design (STSD) because it has enabled new kinds of work systems to proliferate. We identify a new class of sociotechnical system, called the Platform-STS (P-STS), which complements the existing Industrial- and Knowledge-STSs. The P-STS has distinctive characteristics compared to the other classes because it reaches directly into ecosystems and is, therefore, “distributed,” and because it is governed through market mechanisms rather than hierarchy or clan mechanisms. We introduce a new design principle, redundancy of connectivity, to ground design thinking about the P-STS. We demonstrate why fundamental STSD principles need to be reconfigured, suggest how they might do so, and conclude that socioecological designs and interventions may need to supplant sociotechnical ones.

The influence of traditional individually oriented Organization Development (OD), with its focus on psychological dispositions, on self-development and growth, is currently waning. I argue here that individually oriented OD would be well served by a new focus on habitus and social position that expand our understanding of human behavior. Using Bourdieu's concept of social position in the form of “habitus-oriented approach,” as I do here using my consulting experience, allows individually oriented OD to become a scholarly and professional site that understands human behavior in terms of both the social and the personal.

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.

In this chapter we discuss how, as a tool for organizational change, action research can affect the development of cooperation between a traditional university and the external environment. The case analyzed was a two-year action research project carried out in cooperation with over 20 employers. This project was carried out at multiple levels and had several essential goals. Apart from its emancipatory role in the shift in the way students carry out their master's theses (toward application, implementation, where organizations become the research subject instead of the research object), the project's aim was to open up the university to cooperation with its environment and conduct useful research. The results indicate that action research through the democratization of the process of introducing changes and its bottom-up nature influences the development of real cooperation between the university and external organizations. Additionally, they contribute to the emancipation of university knowledge, its democratization, dehierarchization, as well as cocreation and sharing with cooperating organizations.

Ask leaders what their organizations need more of to thrive, and many will identify collaboration. Yet many collaborative efforts fail. A focus on the inner workings of teams, to the exclusion of the ecosystem in which teams work, has masked the importance of a collaborative context. We undertook a single case study of an exemplar firm with the intent of offering a nuanced illustration of the collaborative workplace. We illustrate how three contextual factors related to work, relationships, and behaviors shift the setting from a place where collaboration is hard to do, to one that embodies collaboration as a widespread competence.

Scholarship on workplace diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is voluminous. Nevertheless, there is relatively little work that examines DEI from an organization development and change (ODC) or systems perspective. As a result, there is no unified framework ODC practitioners can use for DEI diagnosis and intervention. The purpose of this chapter is to review the ODC literature with respect to DEI and propose a diagnostic Context-Levels-Culture (CLC) framework for understanding and addressing diversity-related challenges in organizations. We also present a case example of how this framework can be used in DEI consulting, including implications for future research and practice.

For the last four decades, the alignment of strategy and digital technology has persisted as one of the most critical and bothersome issues for senior government executives. Against this backdrop and drawing on the fruits of an extended program of collaborative research between 1995 and 2020, this chapter draws attention to how government organizations foster effective alignment and how this is achieved through four distinct cycles of alignment work. Considering that this work is heavily people- and organization-centric, the chapter calls for greater involvement of organization development and change scholars and practitioners in this important area of organizational life and work.

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, Part One is to make a comparison of organization development (OD) and change management (CM) across eight concepts that are relevant to both OD and CM. The concepts or characteristics are (1) guiding philosophy, (2) value system, (3) theory, (4) primary skill, (5) intervention mode, (6) change model, (7) change activities, and (8) sustainment of change. OD stresses development of people and change regarding the organization, whereas CM emphasizes facilitation and expanding their business with the client organization. A concluding statement for the comparison of OD and CM is that OD has a rich underpinning of theory and a clear set of values that provide guidelines for the work with clients and CM has neither. Thus, CM is a misnomer. Part Two concerns the longer term and includes some consequences for OD from the pandemic of 2020–2021, such as the virtual workplace and leadership. The article concludes with some things to remember, suggesting the importance of group size, large group interventions, and loosely coupled systems.