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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.

This chapter describes two change efforts involving participatory action research within the pharmacy operations division of Kaiser Permanente. Focus is on a parallel learning mechanism that has been used to support communications and change during two large-scale information technology interventions. It begins with basic background information on participatory action research in organizations. Since the case setting is Kaiser Permanente, the chapter provides some information on the U.S. healthcare industry context and then shifts to Kaiser’s communication forum, a learning mechanism that has been in place for 35 years. Cognitive, structural, and procedural aspects of the learning mechanism are explored, and the chapter features interviews with some of the key forum players. Both in the forum’s infancy and in its current more institutionalized state, the pharmacy organization has been in crisis. Implications for the use of parallel learning structures on a long-term basis to support long-term participatory action research are explored along with contributions to theory on insider/outsider action research.

This chapter analyzes the success factors, outcomes, and future viability of large-group methods. We have used an exploratory action research approach focusing on eight variously purposed large-group methods (AmericaSpeaks, Appreciative Inquiry, Conference Model®, Decision Accelerator, Future Search, Participative Design, Strategic Change Accelerator/ACT (IBM), and Whole-Scale™ Change). We interviewed nine leading practitioners and creators for each method, as well as six clients who had played key roles in most of these methods' execution at their organizations, asking them to reflect on the current practices and outcomes and the future of each respective large-group method, as well as the methods as a group of interventions. Based on our findings derived through theme and content analysis of interviews, we purport that both the Art (excellence in method execution) and the Artist (the right facilitator) are necessary for achieving desired outcomes of the large-group methods. We stipulate that critical elements of the Art include these five common elements (or five “I”s): having the right Individuals in the room; aiming the method at resolving the right Issue; having Intentional process (including pre-work, intra-method process, and follow-up); having the right Information in the meeting; and using the right Infrastructure (such as appropriate physical space, technology, etc.). We suggest that while these elements of Art are important, the simultaneous requisite role of the Artist is to manage the tension between the rigidity of the Art (the 5 “I”s) and the emerging human dynamics occurring between the large-group method process and the associated evolving client objectives. That is, to achieve desired outcomes, the execution of large-group method needs to be both highly premeditated and ingenious. We supplement our findings with client case descriptions and quotes from the practitioners and conclude that these large-group methods are particularly appropriate for resolving a variety of issues facing today's organizations operating under the conditions of high technology saturation, interdependence, globalization, economic downturn, and others – and that this, with some exceptions, will likely remain the case in the future. However, the future use of these methods will be challenged by the availability of Artists who can execute the methods so they lead to desired outcomes. We close with discussion of open questions and directions for future research.

Recent research in cognitive and social psychology finds that individual change is more emotional than rational. Further evidence suggests that the contagious power of emotions explains how groups may overcome obstacles and behave in unified ways. We offer a neuropsychological model of emotion-driven change in organizations that explains these findings and predicts conditions in which contagion effects will be successful in facilitating rapid change. Our model posits that emotive precursors to conscious action enable goal alignment and overcome cognitive resource limitations necessary to sustain organizational change over time. Our model adapts the findings from social and cognitive neuroscience to bring new insights into the mental mechanisms underlying the change process. The chapter concludes with tentative suggestions for developing new methods for research and practice that improve our predictive capability for creating rapid large-scale organizational change.

The fatal conceit is the assumption that the world can be shaped according to human desires. This chapter argues that the logic of the fatal conceit can be applied to foreign interventions which go beyond the limits of what can be rationally constructed by reason alone. In suffering from the fatal conceit, these interventions are characterized by: (1) the realization that intentions do not equal results, (2) a reliance on top-down planning, (3) the view of development as a technological issue, (4) a reliance on bureaucracy over markets, and (5) the primacy of collectivism over individualism. These characteristics explain why interventions extending beyond the limits of what can be rationally constructed tend to fail.

The paper extends the organizational learning framework: Structural-Functional (SF)-single-loop or Conflictual-Radical (CR)-double-loop learning to the management accounting literature. The sociological approach of organizational learning is utilized to understand those contingent factors that can explain why management accounting innovations succeed or fail in organizations.

We view learning as enhancing an organization’s strategic competitive advantage by making it better able to adopt and diffuse innovation in respond to changes in its environment in order to manage improved performance. The success of management accounting innovations is contingent upon whether its learning process involves SF-single-loop or CR-double-loop learning to adopt and diffuse process innovation.

The paper suggests that the learning strategy that the organization chooses is the reason why some management accounting innovations are more successfully adopted than others and why some innovations are easily diffused in some organizations but not in others. We propose that the sociological approaches to learning provide an alternative framework with which to better understand the adoption and diffusion of process innovations in management accounting systems.

It has become evident that management accounting researchers need to pay particular attention to an organization’s approach to adoption and diffusion of innovation strategies, particularly when they are designing and implementing process innovation programs for an organization. According to Schulz (2001), there are two interrelated stages of the learning that can shape the outcome of the innovation process in an organization. The first stage is related to the acquisition/production (adoption) of knowledge that results in gathering information, codification, and exploration. This is followed by the second stage which is the distribution or dissemination (diffusion) processes. When these two stages – adoption and diffusion – are applied within an accounting context, they address issues that are commonly associated with the successes and/or failures of management accounting innovations.

Although innovation involves learning, the nature of the learning process does not completely describe the manner in which an innovation affects the organization. Accordingly, we suggest that the two interrelated organizational sociological dimensions of innovations processes, namely, (1) the adoption and diffusion theories of Rogers (1971 and 1995), to approach organizational learning, and (2) the SF (single loop) and CR (double loop) approaches to learning be used simultaneously to describe management accounting innovations.

When an innovation is implemented, it initially can be introduced as an incremental change, one that can be limited in both in its scope and its breadth of administrative changes. This means that situations which are most likely to benefit from its initiation can serve as the prototype for its adoption by the organization. If successful, this can be followed by systemic accounting innovations to instituting broader administrative changes within the existing accounting reporting and control systems.