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The purpose of this paper is to present a qualitative understanding of participants’ experiences in an exemplar large-scale organization development intervention (LODI). The purpose was to understand what contributes to the success of LODIs from participant experiences.

The research design was a qualitative study of one-on-one interview findings (n=23) from participants involved in LODIs that spanned over four years in a complex healthcare system. Participants involved in the process represented clinical, operational, and support service staff as well as all levels from frontline to senior leaders. The 23 participants consisted of 13 women and ten men.

The qualitative analysis showed that participants reported experiences of transformational change, where contextual conditions as well as personal and organizational transformation processes existed in the LODIs. Contextual conditions were shown to have a multiplier effect on the attainment of transformation in what was considered a successful large-scale change, where desired business outcomes were also achieved. Further, access to shared transformational experience is what created context for the sense of community, responsibility, and accountability that spurred change agents into action.

Prior theory and research shows that large-scale and similar organization development interventions result in transformational change, deepened relationships, and successful outcomes as a result of organizational change processes such as emergence and generativity. This study provides new insight into why LODIs work from participants’ perspectives. These findings may be used to design successful LODI processes and expands research to include and be informed by participants’ experiences, in a field predicated on stakeholder involvement to begin with.

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.

The purpose of this study is to review and synthesize pertinent emotional intelligence (EI) research within the human resource development (HRD) scholarship.

An integrative review of literature was conducted and multiple electronic databases were searched to find the relevant resources. Using the content analysis technique, the literature was reviewed and thematically organized.

Seven major themes emerged through the process of content analysis on the body of the reviewed literature. The themes which described the presence of EI-related research within the field of HRD, included: Conceptual connections between EI and HRD; various aspects of EI training and development; the strengths and weaknesses of different EI measurement tools; EI profiles of individuals across various careers; the influence of context in the interpretation of EI; the role of EI in productive interpersonal interactions; and, finally, the impact of EI in leadership development and performance.

The search for this review was limited to peer-reviewed published EI-related articles which contained the keywords “human resource development” or “HRD”. While the field of HRD encompasses a wide variety of areas, this study has the limitation of excluding other relevant articles that did not contain the key terms.

The originality of this study lies in its focus on EI and developing human resources. It argues that EI is a legitimate organization development intervention that can be effectively utilized to improve performance at individual, group, process and organizational levels.

The dialogic nature of new organization development practices brought a dramatic shift in relation to the way OD has had been practiced in the past. However, contemporary literature indicates that OD still has to go a long way if it has to play a central role. The purpose of this paper is to speculate for the concerns being raised about OD practices and propose an interpretive approach to fill in the gaps.

This paper traces OD’s glorious journey, which began with egalitarian values. This section builds on the dynamics of power and politics which was integral to the OD movement and further reviews and critiques the contributions of new OD approaches that has its foundations in postmodernism and social constructionism. In the second part, the paper discusses the critical perspective and introduces the concept of subaltern to fill in the gaps in new OD approaches. Further, the paper finds a ground to integrate and redefine the boundaries of critical and subaltern studies.

The paper proposes an interpretive approach for designing and carrying out OD interventions and introduces the concept of critical-subaltern OD. This approach recognizes the importance to engage with the dialectics or contradictions present between (and within) OD interventions. Through this interpretive approach, the author positions critical-subaltern voices as an integral part of OD interventions and change management.

The interpretive approach gives an insight into the unacknowledged and unheard socially constructed realities of change and OD practices for sensemaking. The approach would also be instrumental in enhancing the levels of engagement and productivity in unacknowledged and non-dominant employees.

This paper is a departure from the modern literature of critical management studies and builds on the critical theory on OD. The paper proposes by roping in the benefits of subaltern studies into OD practices. The paper builds ways to include voices of those, who never gain a voice. In brief, toward the end of the paper, the author proposes an interpretive approach and moves toward critical-subaltern OD. Through this interpretive approach, the author positions critical-subaltern voices as an integral part of OD interventions and change management.

Reports results from an extensive survey of major American change programmes which revealed a set of clusters of interventions. Most typically, the change programmes involved combinations of intervention techniques. Team‐building, strategic planning, skill building and restructuring were the most common interventions. Success, however, appeared to depend on complex interactions amongst individual, organizational and change process variables.

This paper discusses the conceptual and theoretical foundation upon which whole systems change interventions are based The paper first describes six methods of intervention that are currently being utilized to change whole systems: (1) future search, (2) search conferences/ participative design, (3) open space, (4) large scale interactive process methodology, (5) simu‐real, and (6) fast cycle full participation and the conference model. Next, six common values and assumptions underlying these large scale change interventions are identified: (1) organizations are seen as “whole systems,” (2) viewing organizations as whole systems requires the creation of dialogue among all organizational stakeholders, (3) organizations do not exist, but organizing processes and procedures do, (4) what we perceive as our collective organizational reality becomes the organization that is created, (5) individuals within organizations have the capacity to self‐organize and redefine their reality, and (6) humanity shares a set of universal values that are inherently “good” and these values will ultimately influence voluntary collective action. The paper concludes with an appeal for interventionists and users of large group techniques to be cognizant of the assumptions that drive their choice of intervention.

Organization development is focused on implementing a planned process of positive humanistic change in organizations through the use of social science theory, action research, and data-based feedback methods. The role of personality in that change process, however, has historically been ignored or relegated to a limited set of interventions. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a conceptual overview of the linkages between personality and OD, discuss the current state of personality in the field including key trends in talent management, and offer a new multi-level framework for conceptualizing applications of personality for different types of OD efforts. The chapter concludes with implications for research and practice.

Benchmark surveys regarding talent management assessment practices and interventions of choice for organization development (OD) practitioners have shown 360-degree feedback to be a popular tool for both development and decision-making in the field today. Although much has been written about implementing 360-degree feedback since its inception in the 1990s, few longitudinal case examples exist where interventions have been applied and their impact measured successfully. This chapter closes the gap by providing research findings and key learnings from five different implementation strategies for enhancing 360-degree feedback in a large multi-national organization. Recommendations and implications for future research are discussed.

Although learning is a widely recognized method for building individual skills and capabilities, its impact is often minimized in large-scale organizational change efforts in favor of more visible OD- and HR-related interventions. When conceptualized and applied systemically, however, learning itself can be a critical enabler and even a primary driver of organizational culture change. This chapter focuses on the role that a holistic learning agenda can play in a large-scale organizational change effort using insight developed from an applied case study in a large multinational organization.

We explore how scholarly understandings of and the practice of organizational transformation have evolved since Bartunek and Louis’s (1988) Research in Organizational Change and Development chapter. While Bartunek and Louis hoped to see strategy scholarship and OD approaches to transformation inform each other, strategy literature has drifted away from transformation toward more continuous change. OD practice has focused on the implementation of its own versions of transformation through Large Group Interventions, Appreciative Inquiry, the new dialogic OD, and Theory U. Based on a discussion of Theory U, we call attention to the importance of individuals as an important source of new ideas in understanding and practicing large-scale change.