Organizational Design and Development Interventions


The onset of the Information Age has forced industry to continuously seek new and innovative business practices to remain competitive. This has compelled companies to examine the way they do business and to restructure their organizations. Organizational design and development is a process that examines the operation and management of an organization in an effort to ensure efficiency and competitiveness (see Table 5-12).

Table 5-12: ORGANIZATIONAL DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT INTERVENTIONS COMPONENT OF THE HPT MODEL
  • Strategic Planning and Management (Vision, Mission)

  • Environmental Scanning

  • Globalization

  • Benchmarking

  • Reengineering, Realignment , Restructuring

  • Team-building Strategies

  • Problem Solving and Decision Making

  • Culture and Diversity

  • Ethics

  • Spirituality in the Workplace

Organizational operations are affected by both internal and external factors. Political environments, the economy, technology, and social norms all have an impact on how an organization does business. Successful company leaders incorporate a variety of interventions to address these factors and to maintain an edge in their respective markets. The interventions frequently used to affect organizational design and development are shown in Figure 5-13.

Strategic Planning and Management

Strategic planning and management are the core interventions of organizational design and development. Successful strategic planning and management operations are at the heart of an organization and reflect the essence of what the company does. When organizations change, strategic planning and management provide direction to employees and serve as a guide to organizational purpose. This is expressed in terms of the mission, or the purpose of the organization, and the vision, or how the organization will appear when it achieves success.

Strategic planning is the process by which an organization envisions its future and develops the necessary goals and procedures to achieve that vision. To garner support and achieve success, a strategic plan must be easily communicated and must apply to the entire organization.

Strategic management supports the organizational vision through the day-to-day implementation of the strategic plan. Successful organizational change occurs when daily operations and innovations are directly connected to the strategic plan. The results are shared common goals and a sense of ownership by employees and other stakeholders. [77]

Environmental Scanning

Environmental scanning is a strategic planning technique for monitoring the trends in the external environment of an organization. This includes any political, economic, technical, social, national, or international factors that affect the operation of an organization. For example, political unrest in a foreign country may determine the price of a resource essential to the operation of a company, thus having an impact on the cost of doing business.

Environmental scanning provides management with much of the information needed to develop and implement its strategic plan. The process focuses decision making on trends and issues that may have an effect on the organization's future. It can also help determine the education and training needs of current or future employees and assist in developing plans to meet those needs. Environmental scanning also supports other organizational development interventions such as globalization, benchmarking, and reengineering. [78]

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Figure 5-3: INTERVENTIONS FOR ORGANIZATIONAL DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT

Globalization

Globalization is a means of achieving higher productivity and efficiency by identifying and focusing an organization's efforts and resources in key world markets. The fundamental ideals behind globalization are free flow of commerce, capital, and labor, and the belief that individuals can significantly influence large social and economic systems. Globalization is accomplished in several ways. Outsourcing noncore activities, combining purchasing volumes , and centralizing key support activities are examples of globalization techniques. Production and distribution activities are often consolidated to create more efficient operations. Success is based on the ability to quickly adjust to the needs of the customer. For this reason, globalization is often more successful in smaller organizations. Globalization often includes acquisitions, joint ventures , and coproduction. It affects employees, customers, and suppliers. Globalization encourages people to attain a new awareness of both their company and the world in which they live. Through this realization comes new opportunities for personal and professional advancement and satisfaction. [79]

Benchmarking

Through benchmarking, organizations compare themselves to the best industry practices in their field. Understanding best practices helps company leadership identify what must be changed within an organization to achieve its vision. Benchmarking helps define customer requirements, establish effective goals and objectives, develop true measures of productivity, and identify education and training needs for current and future employees. Effective use of benchmarking requires an understanding of the total environment, including:

  • What others have done

  • What standards and practices have been implemented

  • The organization's past performance

  • Changes that affect current and future organizational performance [80]

Reengineering, Realignment, and Restructuring

Reengineering, realignment, and restructuring mean bringing about change in the culture of a business by moving toward team-based management and individual ownership. Many organizations realize that profit, quality output, efficiency, and employee satisfaction are attained only when people share more responsibility in the organization and for its product. This can happen with a radical restructuring of the basic values held among leadership, management, employees, and stakeholders. Total Quality Management (TQM), stewardship , and learning organizations are examples of this type of change. Some of the outcomes resulting from successful reengineering are:

  • The establishment of common and consistent goals

  • Organizational commitment from all stakeholders

  • Team leadership

  • Role clarity among team members

  • Mutual accountability within teams

  • Complementary knowledge and skills

  • Power, both real and perceived

  • Shared rewards [81]

Teambuilding

A key intervention associated with restructuring and reengineering is teambuilding. Teambuilding subscribes to the philosophy that people work better and more creatively in groups than they do alone. Teams may consist of representatives from various groups within an organization. Teambuilding interventions focus on trust, collaboration, openness, and other interpersonal factors. Successful use of this intervention requires commitment and acceptance through organizational readiness, leadership support, and the support and consideration of workers.

Teambuilding strategies are often used to strengthen an organization's culture. Quality circles, organizational matrices, and participative management are examples of teambuilding interventions. Teambuilding encourages people to create common guidelines for conducting business and for promoting ownership of ideas and tasks . The practice encourages confidence, unity, and a sense of belonging and satisfaction in employees and customers. [82]

Problemsolving and Decisionmaking

Problemsolving and decisionmaking are empowerment tools that allow employees and teams to deal directly with problems. Such empowered employees learn how to analyze problems and to select the right solutions using their own experiences and resources. The process provides a structure for organizing work, setting priorities, identifying and diagnosing problems, evaluating alternative solutions, and creating and implementing plans to solve problems. The results of these interventions are often reflected by:

  • Fewer repeat problems

  • An increased ability to anticipate problems, reducing the time spent solving them

  • Fewer conflicts between teams and individuals

  • Increased self-confidence , commitment, and satisfaction among employees

  • More efficient implementation of action plans. [83]

Culture

Culture is a shared system of values, beliefs, and behaviors that characterize a group or an organization. In business, it is demonstrated in the way that things are done. Culture often originates from an organization's mission and vision. It consists of the key values of the organization and the practices that support those values. Culture change is the alteration or modification of an organization's values, beliefs, or behavior system. Culture interventions redefine, clarify, emphasize , or create desired practices within a group. The goal is to influence both employee behavior and production output.

Success is likely when it is clear to employees that strategic goals are consistent with organizational and strategic visions . An example of inconsistent values and goals is when an organization attempts to instill "quality" as a strategic value, but continues to base its operations on production "quantity." [84] In performance-enhancing cultures, managers share values and methods of doing business. The culture is strategically appropriate for the marketplace and it is adaptable. Risk-taking, proactivity, and trust are supported. [85]

Diversity

Diversity is an element of organizational culture. Diversity means differences; differences in employees' ethnic , cultural, and religious backgrounds; education; values; attitudes; and gender. A diverse workforce enhances creative output because people are able to contribute from their varied experiences. A diversity commitment is especially important when dealing with international markets because it prepares an organization to better understand and serve its customers' needs. [86]

Ethics

Ethics define good and bad standards of conduct. Standards are cultural. They vary among countries , companies, incidents, and situations. Ethical standards provide a basis for exercising judgment in day-to-day business operations. They support and help define the culture of an organization. Successful implementation of ethical standards requires that they be applied to every person within a group or organization, as well as outside individuals or groups that do business with the organization. [87]

Spirituality in the Workplace

Work can be not only a place where we go to do a specific job, but also a place where we can experience and express our soul and spirit. Spirituality in the workplace encourages organizations to recognize people's needs and to promote their involvement. Many companies are finally beginning to realize that their employees come to work with a full range of needs and desires, all of which affect the quality of employee efforts and therefore organizational success. Federal Express and Southwest Airlines are two companies integrating workplace spirituality as a performance intervention. "Soul Committees," where employees meet regularly to share experiences and provide mutual support, and "Spirit Awards," which honor employees who practice and encourage creativity, are forms of spirituality practiced in the workplace. [88] The benefits are many: improved communications, increased creativity, enhanced partnerships, greater self-respect, deepened respect for others, and higher morale all emanate from spirituality in the workplace. [89]

In today's marketplace, organizations that wish to remain competitive must reexamine and restructure their operations and implement the changes necessary to ensure continued efficiency and effectiveness. Employee satisfaction, contribution, and ownership are key ingredients to the success of any organization. When consideration for people and the individual pursuit of excellence becomes the standard, organizational excellence blossoms.

The content for the Organizational Design and Development Interventions section, including the job aid, was contributed by Kristin Olin-Sullivan, M.Ed., Henry Ford Community College, and by G. Kevin Sullivan, M.Ed., Freelance Video Producer/Editor. Used with permission.

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Case Study: Morrison-Knudsen Corporation

Morrison-Knudsen Corporation (MK) is a world-leading construction, design, service, and engineering company. The projects it has completed include the Alaska pipeline, EPCOT Center, the Hoover Dam, mining and environmental remediation , and building locomotives. It has a backlog of new work that exceeds $4 billion.

Situation

MK's business is highly competitive. Its marketing efforts are typified by the writing of competitive proposals for multimillion dollar construction, design, and engineering jobs. The cost of writing a proposal can range from a few hundred dollars to more than $200,000. Writing proposals and presenting oral support are labor intensive and time-consuming . The marketing arm of MK wanted to improve the presentation performance of its speakers , who are usually engineers with no public speaking training or experience. Improved oral presentations would increase the company's chances of winning millions of dollars of new work.

Intervention

A PT practitioner conducted an extensive needs analysis, which consisted of watching "live" presentations, videotaping and reviewing practice presentations, and interviewing prospective clients post-presentation. The PT practitioner became involved in the analysis of typical groups as they prepared and practiced their presentations. As a result, some needs that became apparent were (I) to change from an information-only orientation to a sales presentation style; (2) to produce, in a short period, a team presentation; (3) to demonstrate a team responsiveness to technical content and client concerns; (4) to show leadership on the part of the proposed project manager; (5) to strongly communicate specific technical knowledge and team and individual experience; and (6) to demonstrate effective organizational ability to do the proposed work.

The solution to meeting these needs is usually a training intervention; lack of presentation skills would seem to warrant establishing new skills via training. However, certain constraints (e.g., limited time to develop a presentation) precluded intervention training to meet the short-term needs. Training could be used for a more long- term supporting role. The combination of interventions that was utilized included a form of team-building, job aids, coaching, feedback, and modeling.

Team-building was needed so that the presentation would model the team effort that would be used to execute the project. Job aids (e.g., checklists) were needed to guide the sequential development of the presentation. Coaching by an expert presenter, feedback (e.g., videotaping review), and modeling (e.g., samples of well-structured presentation booklets) were also considered useful interventions.

Team-building was accomplished by having the presenters, as opposed to the marketing department, develop the presentation, which helped establish ownership in the presentation. A series of job aids guided the process. An experienced person skilled in developing and enhancing presentations provided coaching. Feedback took many forms, including the coach's comments, the participants ' review of their videotaped sessions, evaluation forms, and comparisons to examples of exemplary presentations. Modeling was achieved by showing the presenters examples of winning presentation documents and videotapes. The interventions were well-integrated and did not conflict with one another.

Results

A series of 10 presentations using the above model were compared with presentations developed by various marketing departments. The conventional approaches they used usually included evaluative feedback designed to enhance overall group and individual presenter skills. Although the conventional presentations did win contracts, after the new model was put to use, there was an increase of about 250 percent in contracts.

Moreover, clients indicated that the presentations were "some of the best they had ever seen," and this was sometimes expressed even when the project was not awarded to MK for other reasons (economic, experience, etc.). The general reaction of participants who experienced the multiple intervention approach was that it was more systematic and focused on results.

Lessons Learned

  1. One intervention is often insufficient to solve a company's problems. Multiple interventions work best.

  2. By using alternative solutions to overcome constraints, the company won new work.

  3. A thorough needs assessment is critical to selecting appropriate interventions.

Deterline, W.A. and Rosenberg, M.J. Eds., (1992). Workplace productivity: Performance technology success stories. Washington, D.C.: NSPI, pp. 17 “18. Used with permission of the International Society for Performance Improvement .

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Job Aid 5-13: EVALUATING TEAM ATTITUDES
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Directions: Use this survey to acquire information about how team members feel about their team and the job they are doing. Areas with lower scores indicate potential areas for team-building intervention. Use the following scale to respond to each statement below as it applies. 3 - AGREE 2 - DON'T KNOW 1 - DISAGREE

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ISPI 2000 Permission granted for unlimited duplication for noncommercial use.

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[77] Powers, 1992

[78] Saccucci, Lord, and Pagano, 1998

[79] Shepperd, 1998

[80] Saccucci, Lord, and Pagano, 1998

[81] Saccucci, Lord, and Pagano, 1998

[82] Dormant, 1992; and Thiagarajan, 1992

[83] Bud Erickson Associates, Inc., 1998

[84] Lineberry and Carleton, 1992

[85] Kotter and Heskett, 1992

[86] Gordon, 1995

[87] Westgaard, 1992

[88] Rutte, 1998

[89] Rutte and Monette, 1991




Fundamentals of Performance Technology. A Guide to Improving People, Process, and Performance
Fundamentals of Performance Technology: A Guide to Improving People, Process, and Performance
ISBN: 1890289086
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 98

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