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Reflections on gender and OD over a 50-year career as a scholar, an OD practitioner, and a woman managing a complex life and career.

My journey in OD has spanned 50 years which is also about as long organization development has been around. In this essay, I will reflect on my experiences with special attention to issues of gender. I will also mention some issues of concern that confront us as OD scholars and practitioners, especially the balance between thinking and doing. As I describe my experiences, I hope they will lead to an appreciation of all that has happened in just 50 years! My experience is not everyone’s experience. I make no claim to that. I hope that some of the issues I raise resonate with you, or fill in some blanks, or lend a different perspective.

Over the past decades the devastating issue of workplace bullying and its “cancerous” impact on workplace emotions has seen “today's costliest secret” become exposed (Einarsen, Hoel, Zapf & Cooper, 2003, p. 32; Glendinning, 2001, p. 296; Needham, 2003, p. 12). Bullying at work has become so prevalent within today's workplace that 1 of the 4 of us are estimated to suffer the crippling abuse of the workplace bully, costing Australian organizations between $17 billion and $36 billion each year (Clarke, J. (2005). Working with monsters: How to identify and protect yourself from the workplace psychopath. Sydney: Random House Australia; Rayner, C. (2000). Building a business case for tackling bullying in the workplace: Beyond a cost-benefit analysis. In: Sheehan, M., Ramsey, C., & Patrick, J. (Eds), Transcending boundaries. Proceedings of the 2000 Conference, September, Brisbane). The impending doom faced by the target of the bully demeans the individual to such an extent that bullying has been associated with suicide, post-traumatic stress disorder, and even increased risk of coronary heart disease and has been demonstrated to sever “at home” relationships, with grave implications on work-life balance (Archer, 1999; Geffner, Braverman, Galasso & Marsh, 2004; Lewis, 2006). Yet despite the significant lose–lose outcomes of workplace bullying for both the individual and the well-documented consequences of decreased productivity for the organization, there seems to be little progress toward meaningfully addressing the issues that actually create, promote, and sustain workplace bullying (Bolton, 2007; Dutton & Ragins, 2007; Heames & Harvey, 2006; Peyton, 2003). Rather than narrowly concentrating on bullying and its drivers which limits workplace bullying to an occupational health and safety issue, this chapter demonstrates the practical implementation across five Victorian public sector organizations of a tool developed using the principles of positive psychology. This approach places bullying in the wider context of positive workplace emotions, allowing for consideration of the broader organizational characteristics and the subtle negative behaviors which are suggested to underlie the deep seated and pervasive nature of workplace bullying. The preliminary findings suggests that the tool was seen as valuable in creating a bully-free culture and resonates practically by offering insights into some of the issues organizations should consider to ensure such initiatives provide a genuine source of competitive advantage.

Early in one’s career in psychology, certainly starting in graduate school, if not sooner as a psych major in college, a choice point gradually emerges between seeking a career as a scholar, a scientist, and perhaps as an academic versus pursuing the life of a practitioner, one who applies the work of the former, the scholar. We faculty will often cast this choice in the form of a “tension” between science and practice. Ironically, I have never felt such tension. The purpose of this chapter is to explore choices we make in life and career, the consequences of these choices, and what we can learn in the process, that is, along the way and the implications for organization change and development.

Discrimination is an intergroup as well as an interpersonal phenomenon and is related to fundamental processes associated with social categorization and the development of in-group favoritism. We propose in the Common In-Group Identity Model that by understanding the factors that underlie the development of these inter-group biases, these forces can be redirected to improve intergroup relations. In particular, if members of different groups are induced to recategorize themselves as a superordinate group rather than as two separate groups, intergroup prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination will be reduced through the extension of pro-in-group bias to former out-group members. Moreover, recategorization in the form of a dual identity, in which superordinate and subgroup identities are both salient, can achieve the benefits of a strong superordinate identity without requiring groups to forsake valued ethnic and racial identities. Data reported from laboratory studies, field experiments, and surveys involving a range of different types of groups offer converging evidence in support of the model.