Organizational Development Theory

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Organizational Development Theories
In today's environment, one of the greatest assets with organizations is the ability to change. Organizational development is the attempt to influence the members of an organization to expand their boundaries in terms of knowledge, and experience about the organization in order to take greater responsibility for their own actions as organization's members. The main assumption behind OD is that as people act on these objectives they find new ways of working together to achieve organizational and personal goals. When alignment of goals does not take place, OD helps them in understanding what choices can be exercised and how it can help.
Following are some of the theories of organizational development:
Classical Organization Theory
This theory represents a merger of scientific management, bureaucratic theory, and administrative theory. Scientific management theory was developed by Frederick Taylor during the beginning of 19th century. The theory had four basic principles:
1. Finding out the best way to perform a job
2. Matching right worker to right job
3. Supervising workers and using reward and punishment as motivators
4. Planning and control are tasks of management
Initially this theory was well adopted as it helped improving production by aligning equipment and people. The theory aimed at analyzing each component of production process to find out combinations which yielded maximum production. While the scientific management theory was successful for small industrialized companies, it did not fare well in the modern setup of companies. The approach of improving production as the top priority of companies put people to second leaving them dissatisfied with work. This further led to declined production and quality, loss of pride in workmanship, and complete loss of organizational pride.
Taylors' theory was expanded upon by Max Weber who stressed on the need to reduce ambiguity in organizations. He had a focus of defining clear lines of control and authority. Thus, the bureaucratic theory emphasized on the need to have hierarchical structure of power with formal rules to ensure stability and uniformity. Weber stressed the importance of human interactions in organizational behavior.
Administrative theory was formalized by Mooney and Reiley with an emphasis on establishing universal set of management principles which could be applied to all ...