a note of alarm about the business effectiveness addition to OD’s humanistic values (see Nicoll, 1998), noting that if OD were to move significantly away from its humanistic roots in favor of organization efficiency and productivity, OD would be “unrecognizable from its origins” (Church et al., 1992, p. 14) and that “a realization of this trend in the extreme . . . would mean the end of OD as a distinct field” (p. 7). However, not all agree that a focus on business effectiveness is harmful to the field of OD. Some have argued that the humanistic values of OD have adapted pragmatically to contemporary organizational challenges (Margulies & Raia, 1990) and that this is just another adaptation to needs. Others note that there may be a generational gap developing between those who have been in the field for a long time, who lament the addition of efficiency and profitability to OD’s foundational values (and the concomitant watering down of its humanistic roots), and those who are new to practicing OD, who see OD interventions as a means to help clients achieve the business outcomes they seek (Hultman, 2002). David Bradford and Warner Burke (2005) write that there is a downside to OD’s insistence on humanistic values, noting that they produce a group of practitioners advocating for their own values and who are perhaps naive about the varying circumstances in which certain values should be emphasized over others.
Implemented appropriately, humanistic concerns and business effectiveness need not be always contradictory objectives, since “we must be concerned with both the people being affected and the way in which they work (the process), as well as what they actually produce (the outcome)” (Church et al., 1994, p. 35). Ultimately, if the job of the OD practitioner is to assist the client in helping them achieve what they desire to achieve, this can be done within the broad context of OD’s core values and ethical beliefs. This is not to say that there are no challenges or tensions, however, to holding to these beliefs. For example, what is the consultant’s responsibility in helping a client redefine job responsibilities for employees who do not desire to change job tasks? The OD practitioner must hold to the conviction that achieving personal effectiveness and business outcomes are not always by necessity contradictory ends, and the practitioner must therefore learn to navigate the challenges and tensions to holding OD values, being conscious of the choices being made.
Challenges to Holding Organization Development Values
Schein (1990a) and Church et al. (1992) see tensions and challenges to the practitioner in holding to the values described above:
1. Financial and economic tensions. OD practitioners are frequently either external consultants needing to sell clients on an approach or internal practitioners working with managers of the same organization. In either case, it is easier to describe approaches to solving a problem than to engage in a philosophical statement about values to a potential client. External consultants making a living in OD may find it easier to talk with clients about OD techniques versus holding nebulous values-based dialogues. They may decide to accept an engagement that does not fit with their values over declining the invitation of a paying client. Church et al. (1992) refer to this as a “tension of being driven by ego gratification, personal success, and financial rewards versus championing traditional humanistic values in the consulting process” (p. 20).
2. The push to see OD as technology. OD practitioners find it tempting to quickly and arbitrarily use favorite tools or the latest technique in an attempt to be cutting edge. Businesses and consulting practices have evolved that promote specific OD techniques so that both consultants and clients may be enamored with a popular approach or a sales pitch. In any case, the excitement over a new technique may overshadow the values on which it is based or the necessity of implementing it in the first place. Margulies and Raia (1990) write, “Many practitioners have become routine in their applications; they have succumbed to management pressure for the quick fix, the emphasis on the bottom line, and the cure-all mentality. . . . They seem to have lost sight of the core values of the field” (p. 38). Many students and new practitioners of OD in particular become enamored with books outlining “101 new OD interventions” without full knowledge of when and why they would be applied.
3. Management culture and expectations. Speed and productivity are key values of business culture in the United States. Managers seek rapid solutions to immediate problems and want to be able to quantitatively prove the value of spending money on a consultant. A consultant who spends time with surveys, conducting interviews, giving feedback, or facilitating meetings may appear to be producing very little and taking a long time to do so. This culture of productivity and expectations of speed pushes OD practitioners away from the rigor of values-based diagnostic processes and into rapid discussions of solutions and intervention programs. This creates a “tension between projecting one’s own values and normative beliefs onto client organizations versus being only a facilitator for serving management’s interests” (Church et al., 1992, p. 20). Managers may see a practitioner who discusses values as out of touch with contemporary organizational challenges.
4. Research. Academic research projects that sought to compare and contrast methods and techniques used in OD work have pushed practitioners to see OD (and the field to evolve) as a set of techniques that resulted in certain outcomes rather than to examine whether those techniques appropriately applied the core values of the field (Schein, 1990a).
Statement of Organization Development Ethics
Ethics follow from values in guiding practitioners in how to implement and enact values. Ethical beliefs outline more and less desirable behaviors, based on a set of underlying values such as those defined above (White & Wooten, 1985). In a survey of organization development and human resources professionals in the early 1980s, practitioners admitted that there was no widespread definition of ethics for the field. Several scholars collaborated on an early draft of a statement, which was further revised. An annotated version was published in a book in 1990 by William Gellermann, Mark Frankel, and Robert Ladenson. The statement of ethical guidelines for OD professionals is reprinted in the appendix to this chapter. This statement contains many of the categories of OD values discussed earlier in this chapter, including client-centered values.
This clear statement of ethics has many followers and will be a useful guide for you throughout this book. Ethical conflicts do occur for OD professionals, and we will explore some of them in later chapters.
Summary
The values of organization development are a significant part of its identity, and they distinguish OD from other methods of consulting. Its values help practitioners with making choices about how to proceed in an intervention. They clarify our thinking and help to establish a dialogue with clients about what we value and why. They also provide a method for evaluating our work and give practitioners a larger purpose for their work. OD’s values include participation, involvement, empowerment, groups and teams, growth, development, learning, thinking of organizational members as whole people, dialogue, collaboration, authenticity, openness, and trust.
Recently, business effectiveness has been added to this list of humanistic concerns to include values such as quality, productivity, and efficiency, which some highlight as a potential conflict with OD’s humanistic values tradition. In any case, values conflicts do occur as OD practitioners must cope with economic and cultural forces that push them to see OD as a set of tools or intervention techniques and to neglect the values that underlie these techniques. Finally, a statement of OD ethics has been developed as an explicit statement of desired practitioner behaviors that are based on OD’s values.
Questions for Discussion
1 List four or five of your own personal values. How do these affect your actions? How do your values relate to the values of OD covered in this chapter?
2 Of the OD values listed in Chapter 3, are there any that you think should carry greater weight than others? Which ones? Why?
3 Think of an organization of which you have been a member. Did that organization model any of the values in this chapter well? How so?
For Further Reading
Gellermann, W.,