TWELVE

Organization Development Scholar-Practitioners
Between Scholarship and Practice

JEAN M. BARTUNEK
AND EDGAR H. SCHEIN*

WE BEGIN THIS CHAPTER by stipulating that academic-practitioner relationships and the ability of academics to communicate with practitioners matter deeply. We and many others hope very much that academics’ research findings can help to facilitate more effective management practice (e.g., Bartunek, 2003, 2007; Hambrick, 1994; Huff, 2000; McGregor, 1960; Rousseau, 2006; Rynes, Bartunek, & Daft, 2001; Schein, 1965, 2009a, 2009b; Van de Ven, 2002, 2007; Van de Ven & Johnson, 2006). We also hope that academics can learn from practitioners (Bartunek, 2007; Schein, 2009a, 2009b; Van de Ven, 2007).

Nevertheless, we realize that accomplishing such improved communication is not easy. As Pettigrew (2001, S61) stated, “If the duty of the intellectual in society is to make a difference, the management research community has a long way to go to realize its potential.” Regardless of its difficulty, attempting to have scholarly findings facilitate practice and practice facilitate scholarly learning is important. Bad management is tangibly damaging (Adler & Jermier, 2005; Ghoshal, 2005; Rousseau, 2006), and if academics do not speak, less rigorously developed—but much more effectively marketed—knowledge (cf. Ernst & Kieser, 2002) is going to be virtually the only source of management knowledge for practitioners.

There are multiple problems in linking academic management theory with practice, and it will suffice to name just a few. Many academics do not know how to write for practitioners (cf. Bartunek & Rynes, 2010). Practitioners do not regularly read academic journals (Rynes, Colbert, & Brown, 2002). New organization development (OD) practitioners are typically less versed in academic knowledge than those who joined the field in the 1970s or earlier (Bunker, 2010).

How to Respond?

Abstract analyses of problems associated with academic-practitioner knowledge transfer and earnest exhortations to do better have not generally succeeded in changing the tenor of the conversation in ways that feel satisfactory. In this chapter, rather than focus on exhortations or sweeping theoretical pronouncements, we are going to focus on discrete small wins (Weick, 1984) associated with those who define themselves as scholar-practitioners. By scholar-practitioners we include scholars dedicated to developing new knowledge useful to practitioners (Wasserman & Kram, 2009), or more broadly, to “actors who have one foot each in the worlds of academia and practice and are pointedly interested in advancing the causes of both theory and practice” (Tenkasi & Hay, 2008, p. 49).

We want in this chapter to practice what we preach, to be accessible to both practitioners and academics. Thus, we have organized much of our presentation around narratives, which have become increasingly recognized as an important way of communicating information successfully to both groups (e.g., Carson, 2009; Gergen, 1994; Gergen & Gergen, 1993; Ibarra & Barbulescu, 2010; Wasserman & Kram, 2009).

We will illustrate the points we make with narratives from one or both of our own experiences as occasional organization development practitioners. These narratives have arisen in large part from lengthy conversations the two of us have had in which we have reflected on our own OD experiences over many years and explored issues that are particularly important to us with regard to academic-practitioner links.

Definitional and Conceptual Roots of OD

Our Working Definition of OD

There has been a range of definitions of OD over the years. For simplicity’s sake, we will define it in this chapter as a form of helping organizations achieve greater effectiveness through various forms of “process consultation” (Schein, 1969, 1999a, 2009a). As scholar-practitioners, OD consultants do not tell an organization what to do where its human systems are involved. Rather, based on their scholarly knowledge, consultants engage members of the organization in a joint effort to help them address their concerns.

According to this definition, crucial characteristics of OD are client and consultant learning, attention to processes by which learning happens, and joint efforts to resolve issues of concern. Consultants are expected to bring process expertise. Further, they should be sufficiently knowledgeable about academic literature in the relevant social sciences to be able to work with clients on the various human and systemic problems that clients face.

Conceptual Roots of OD

OD’s roots are in action research, where it is expected that research will inform practice and practice will inform scholarly knowledge (e.g., Lewin, 1951; Pasmore & Friedlander, 1982). Many interventions by OD practitioners have direct roots in academic theorizing. As just a few examples, Bunker and Alban (1997, 2006) show that currently popular large-group interventions have roots in the work of Kurt Lewin, Wilfrid Bion, Fred Emery, Eric Trist, Richard Beckhard, Daniel Katz, Robert Kahn, and others. Beer (1980) and Lippitt (1982) described ways in which systems theory, contingency theory, group development and job design models, and a host of other theoretical developments could be used to guide OD interventions. Margulies and Raia (1978) added ways in which Gestalt theory and sociotechnical systems approaches could be used in OD practice. Argyris and Schön’s (1978) work on organizational learning has inspired the development of learning organizations. Schein’s (2009a) recent analysis of the helping relationship draws heavily on Erving Goffman’s (1959, 1963, 1967) sociological model of human interaction and the sociology of symbolic interactionism (Cooley, 1902/1922; Van Maanen, 1979).

Further, the scholarly bases for OD interventions continue to evolve. For example, Marshak and Grant (2008) and Bushe and Marshak (2009) recently showed how much current OD is based more on a dialogic approach than the diagnostic approach that characterized early OD interventions. The dialogic approach is based on Gergen’s (1978) and others’ critiques of positivism and emphasis on the importance of social constructivism.

Thus, the questions we ask in the following section take the scholarly roots of OD for granted. Without it, the “scholar” dimension of the scholar-practitioner role does not have meaning.

Questions for Academic-Practitioner Relationships

The following five questions address several “small” (Weick, 1984), or at least circumscribed, issues. In them, we use the terms “consultant” and “scholar-practitioner” interchangeably.

Questions and Answers

1. How extensive and deep is the consultant’s academic knowledge?

For OD scholar-practitioners to be able to help facilitate practitioner knowledge and better practice, they first need to be familiar with the appropriate academic knowledge. This claim may not seem startling, given what we have said about conceptual roots of OD. However, as we noted previously and as others have commented (e.g., Bunker, 2010), newer practitioners are moving away from, rather than toward, academic knowledge.

JEAN “Several years ago I participated in a conference that primarily included practitioners. At the beginning, the organizers had us divide into groups based on the decade in which we had started becoming involved in OD and to discuss what had nurtured our involvement. All of us in the 1970s group talked about links between academia and practice. Those in the 1980s and 1990s groups included fewer links with academic roots. Most of those in the 2000s group had become involved for reasons that were personally important, but that had nothing to do with academia; sometimes they almost saw their work as anti-academic.”

While lack of a link between academic theorizing and OD practice is fine in some ways, it obviously limits the possibilities of academic knowledge informing the practice of OD or of practice learnings leading back to and informing academic knowledge. Ghoshal (2005) noted that blindly following academic literature sometimes leads to bad managerial practice. Thus, we are not claiming that all academic knowledge is equally good for practice. However, some of it—as illustrated by Bunker and Alban (1997)—clearly has been crucial for the development of new practice. Consultants must therefore be able to determine what academic knowledge can be truly helpful to particular practice based on their academic education and ongoing academic participation.

We believe that if OD consultants are ignorant of relevant academic knowledge, their OD work will be less likely to accomplish good practice over the long run. (This claim, of course, can be tested empirically.) But if consultants are reasonably in touch with what academics are producing in the more formal scholarly environment and can calibrate its applicability and convert it, their knowledge—when applied in action—is likely to lead to more effective practice. Becoming aware of the applicability of academic knowledge does not mean only superficial awareness of some findings. It implies an active understanding of how one’s own daily activities are informed by what researchers have found and the ability to imagine how these might be used in consulting.

What does such scholarly awareness enable in practice? It enables a consultant to “see” something different beneath the surface of a set of events and to intervene based on this awareness. It makes evident that such seeing will take place much more easily if the consultant is paying attention to normal, everyday practice and being curious about it in academic terms. This type of awareness can foster academic knowledge as well. As Ed’s example suggests, it can contribute to new lines of inquiry, such as in safety analyses enhancing Weick’s (1990) and Langer’s (1989) analyses of how mindlessness contributes to accidents.

These examples raise issues about what it means to translate academic research for practice. Application doesn’t come in the form of handing people research results or citations to original research and saying, “See what you can do with these,” but paying attention to academic literature and actually using our knowledge of what researchers have found in an interactive way. If we know the work well enough that we recognize its manifestations when an incident occurs, then we can apply our knowledge in the immediate interaction. It is our experience that when we use concepts and theory in such a fashion, they can be particularly important in helping practitioners to frame their experiences and to provide new behavioral models as well.

Which academic disciplines should OD scholar-practitioners be familiar with now? Aspects of organizational behavior, strategy, political science, economics, social psychology, sociology, anthropology, and cognitive (and neuro-) psychology could all be helpful. Complete organizational consultants really should be very, very broad thinkers if we’re really going to help practitioners, because we don’t always quite know in advance where the relevant knowledge might lie.

2. As one aspect of such knowledge applied to practice, does the consultant appreciate systems dynamics adequately to intervene appropriately?

Systems thinking in one guise or another has been a central component of OD since its beginnings as an effort to work with “the whole system” (French & Bell, 1998). As Bunker (2010) has outlined, early OD work related to systems included models of open systems taken from the work of von Bertalanffy (1968) and adapted by Katz and Kahn (1966), sociotechnical systems design (Emery & Trist, 1965), and Likert’s (1967) System 4 among others. Other approaches to organizational systems through the years have included Gestalt theory applied to OD (Margulies & Raia, 1978), open systems planning (Beckhard, 1969), process redesign (Hammer & Champy, 1993), systems thinking as one dimension of the learning organization (Senge, 1990), large-group interventions (Bunker & Alban, 1997, 2006; Holman, Devane, & Cady, 2007) and social network analysis (Borgatti & Foster, 2003), process management (Deming,1986; Juran, 1989), and attempts to make use of scholarly work regarding complex adaptive systems (e.g., Olson & Eoyang, 2001).

The use of systems approaches continues to evolve; large-group interventions are the first set of interventions explicitly designed to address whole systems (Bunker, 2010). Consultants must be able to anticipate the impact of their interventions not only on an immediate client but on the human systems around that client. A great deal of damage can be done by practitioners who are ignorant of the accumulated academic knowledge about how human systems work and how this knowledge might be applied.

ED “I am often asked in connection with doing a culture assessment to come visit an organization to explore the issues and decide how to proceed. I almost never agree to such a visit unless I have talked to the primary contact clients somewhere away from their organization to examine the potential impact of a consultant showing up at the organization. I want the contact client to understand that such a visit would arouse questions and possibly anxieties unless the contact client made it clear why I was showing up and owned the process by which I would be introduced into the organization. My goal in those early conversations would be to make the client very aware of the systemic consequences of different kinds of next steps such as interviews or surveys.”

One of the worst examples of ignoring systemic dynamics is the consultant conducting initial interviews ostensibly to formulate a diagnosis or as the basis of a survey in order to find out how people feel. In both cases, expectations and anxieties are aroused that if not dealt with by the client will worsen the situation. The responsible scholar-practitioner would not go ahead with interviews or surveys without a thorough exploration of the possible systemic consequences. The most important of those consequences is the expectation that once employees have stated their feelings and issues, they expect management to do something about it. If managers are not prepared to deal with what they learn, morale and management credibility will decline.

3. How can academic knowledge be communicated in writing for use in practice?

The material in the previous sections addresses some ways that academic knowledge may be used within the context of consultation. The third question refers, primarily, to how to communicate academic knowledge to practitioners outside of a formal consulting engagement and primarily through writing.

There is some literature on this topic. For example, Bartunek and Rynes (2010) have explored how implications for practice have been written in academic journals and how they might be written in a much more effective way. Leung and Bartunek (in press) discuss ways that academic evidence may be communicated by means other than writing (e.g., through informal venues or teaching cases). But how should scholar-practitioners write if they want to be understood by both academics and practitioners?

ED “There is a great difference in how I wrote about organizational culture for academics and managers in my books Organizational Culture and Leadership (4th edition, 2010) and The Corporate Culture Survival Guide (1999b, 2009c). The first edition of Organizational Culture and Leadership was written with fellow academics in mind. My intent was to make it as bell clear as I could, using all my knowledge, and write it in a formal fashion. That involved putting down everything I considered relevant to the understanding of how culture and leadership are intertwined. So it’s a big book, it’s an academic book, and it gets used that way.

“Somewhere in the nineties I realized that, in my practice, when I got around to talking about culture, the people I was working with were misusing the term. Everyone wanted to change their culture and clearly did not understand that this was not possible in the simplistic way that people used the culture concept. So I wrote the second book called The Corporate Culture Survival Guide (1999b), with totally different intentions. I was now going to write to managers and use more direct language: If you want to change your culture, here’s what you have to do. You first have to figure out what problem you are trying to solve and then translate the potential solution into behavioral terms. If you change the behavior and it works over a period of time, you will be gradually changing the culture. So I took some of the relevant content from the first book and rewrote it with managers in mind. In advocating this approach I was allying myself with the research findings of Leon Festinger (1957), who had convinced me that it is easier to change behavior first than to change values first.

“The two books are written differently in that the original book has to stand the test of an academic audience. If graduate students are reading the Organizational Culture and Leadership book, it has to be expressed clearly, accurately, and with proper referencing. There’s going to be an instructor’s guide. With the other book, I was really saying, ‘Look, if you’re going to fool around with this culture stuff, here are the ABCs.’ There are fewer references, and I put more emphasis on certain things. What in the big culture book might have been a chapter toward the end that emphasizes how you produce change becomes the main focus of the Corporate Culture Survival Guide book.

“Almost all my contacts come from somebody who has read something I’ve written. People read and learn from what they read if it is clear enough. From both books, the huge lesson I have learned about how you get to be a consultant is that writing is important. It is the writing that attracts the practitioner audience, which would suggest that academics should think about writing more than one version of what they feel they know from their research.

“Writing for practitioners involves a different framework and style of communication but still necessitates building on sound academic knowledge. An example of misleading practitioners because of drawing on incorrect knowledge is contained in the OD consulting books that advocate ‘stages of data gathering and diagnosis’ prior to recommending an ‘intervention.’ While discrete ‘interventions’ may indeed follow data gathering, Chris Argyris (1970) made evident 40 years ago that the intervening process starts with initial entry into a system. Bob Marshak and David Grant (2008) are emphasizing something similar, the importance of conversation, dialog, and engagement as central from the beginning of OD processes.

“In other words, the initial interaction between a consultant and a client is already an intervention. If academic consultants believe that they are ‘just gathering data,’ they are ignoring not only the Heisenberg principle that measurement itself has an impact on a system but the whole scientific basis for double-blind research studies. I make this a central issue in my books on process consultation (1969, 1999a), so that readers are forewarned not to be seduced by the claims that long and expensive periods of diagnosis and data gathering are necessary prior to intervention. You’ve intervened when you first picked up the phone or showed up at the client’s site.”

Writing clearly is very important. Virtually all of Ed’s consulting contacts have come from what people have read. Jean’s practitioner contacts have also come in large part from her writing. In other words, writing is a form of intervention as well.

4. How willing is the scholar-practitioner to learn from practice?

For OD scholars and consultants to be able to speak to practice, they also need to be able to learn from practice. Knowledge that is useful for both theory and practice is not a one-way street from theory to practice. In fact, some of the most important things learned are often from practice itself. Jean had an important learning about this that she published in the Academy of Management Journal (Bartunek, 2007, p. 1323).

JEAN “In March 2007, I had an instructive, if sobering, experience. I was participating in a conference, Nexus for Change (nexusforchange.org), the bulk of whose attendees were designers and facilitators of “large group” or “whole systems” planned change interventions. . . .

“At the conference, I gave a talk to a few of the participants about how external researchers and designers/facilitators of such interventions can collaborate to study the effectiveness of the interventions using a joint insider/outsider research approach. . . . One of the people who attended that talk was a woman who has designed a successful large group intervention and who took several important leadership roles in conjunction with the conference. I was very impressed with her initiative, creativity, and considerable competence. She came to my talk because recent changes in funding requirements required her to demonstrate successful outcomes of her intervention. Thus, she was interested in learning something about research that could help her explore outcomes.

“But while she was at my talk, she acted differently and less confidently than she had otherwise at the conference. She mentioned that she had taken a research methods class once and had barely passed it. Terms like ‘research question’ did not have intuitive meaning for her, but instead evoked anxiety. Certainly, the language of independent, dependent, and mediating and moderating variables was foreign to how she designed or facilitated her large group intervention; she thought much more holistically. I drew a causal model, complete with boxes and arrows, regarding a possible study of the effectiveness of her intervention. But this was not, for her and for several other attendees at the talk, a familiar or helpful way of thinking.”

This experience was central to the essay and led Jean to focus on the importance of relationships between academics and practitioners that extend beyond research involvement in which the researcher is primary or consulting engagements in which the practitioner is primary. It is important to develop means for both parties to be able to interact on somewhat equal terms. Ed has also learned valuable lessons from practice that have affected both his theorizing and his research.

ED “Much of the knowledge I gained about how culture works in organizations was obtained from hours of attendance at meetings in Digital Equipment Corporation and attending annual top executive meetings in Ciba-Geigy. The evolution of the ‘clinical approach’ to learning about organizations arose from the frequent experience that what was observed was often unrelated to the formal reason for being there or was an unanticipated consequence of interventions (Schein, 1987, 2008). Lewin’s dictum that you don’t understand an organization until you try to change it was a profound insight.

“For example, I got to be a process consultant in working with Digital on their group process to help their top management team be more effective. I knew from my many National Training Laboratories (NTL) T-group experiences what a good group should be. People should listen, be respectful, not interrupt each other. In Digital I encountered emotional and interpersonal chaos and worked hard to point out the dysfunctionality of how the group worked and always was politely thanked for my punitive interventions, but nothing changed. Eventually I ‘gave up’ and started to pay attention to what was going on and asked myself the question: ‘Why are these intelligent and nice people continuing to fight with each other and not do what I’m recommending to them?’

“And that led to the insight that they are doing something that they need to do, namely, figure out which ideas are good enough to implement. They had learned as academics and practicing engineers that the way you do that is to argue with each other and see which idea survives. And if you’re also passionate, that means you’re going to interrupt each other. If you accept that as their process with the goal of finding the best idea, then helping them to keep track of ideas becomes the new goal. So one day I went to the flip chart and started to write ideas down and if someone got interrupted I could say to the original speaker, ‘I didn’t get all of that.’ I now focused on the idea instead of punishing the interrupter for interrupting. Seeing their ideas on the flip chart helped them to track things, and they found that really helpful. We all learned how important it was to use a new process (someone recording ideas on the flip chart and monitoring the idea production process) that is congruent with the goal (to process and evaluate different ideas).

“What did I learn from that? I realized that they had a culture, that this culture could be described, and that what I knew from anthropology, particularly the Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck (1961) research on how different cultures can have dramatically different value sets, illuminated for me how different subcultures worked. That insight led later to the important discovery that all organizations have three generic subcultures—an executive subculture that is all about money, an operator subculture that is all about the daily work of the organization, and an engineering subculture that is about innovation and design of the work (Schein, 1996).”

As these examples indicate, it is valuable for scholar-practitioners not to approach a client system with the assumption that existing theory is sacrosanct. Rather, working with an organization is a wonderful way to test already established academic theory and to develop new ways of thinking based on learnings from the setting. This is one valuable way of establishing two-way pathways between theory and practice.

5. How important are bridging institutions in which academics and practitioners get to know each other?

Bridging institutions are organizations in which scholars and practitioners interact in a learning context that provides academic knowledge to practitioners and experience in how to be helpful to scholars. Executive education programs both inside and outside business schools provide some bridging opportunities, but it is organizations like the National Training Laboratories and the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL) that provide the best opportunities for such mutual learning.

Both Ed and Jean have been associated with NTL and SoL. Ed conducted training for NTL for many years and Jean was, while she was in her doctoral program, a participant in NTL’s Graduate Student Professional Development Program. She is currently an associate editor of the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science (JABS), a journal published by NTL. Jean and Ed were both founding members of SoL. Jean co-authored a paper with SoL leaders about changes in their core competencies course (Bartunek et al., 2007). Ed was the founding editor of Reflections, the SoL journal, which is “focused on the leading edge of organizational learning in practice” and attempted in every issue to carry articles and comments from researchers, consultants, and practitioners in order to build bridges across these three communities (http://www.solonline.org/reflections/aboutreflections).

Research centers such as the Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, NC, and the Center for Effective Organizations at USC can also serve this bridging function if they create opportunities for practitioners and academics to interact around real organizational problems to be solved. To be helpful to practitioners, the first step for academics is to get to know some of them and to discover not only what they do or do not know but what issues they are trying to address. Similarly, practitioners need the opportunity to get inside the heads of researchers to begin to understand how academic knowledge is generated. Sometimes these attempts illustrate the challenges associated with sharing academic-practitioner knowledge.

JEAN “In March, 2010 I participated in an NTL conference focused on developing the ‘New OD.’ A few people who identify themselves more with academic scholarship than practice were there, along with several people who identified themselves as scholar-practitioners and many who identified themselves primarily as practitioners. It was evident in group discussions that many of the participating practitioners are very bright and intellectually curious.

“In one group I was in, for example, several people expressed creative ideas about possible roles of design in new ways of practicing OD. However, when I mentioned that in 2007 JABS had published a special issue on design as applied to OD, most were not aware of it and one commented that some of the articles in it were ‘tough to read.’

“I have also found that it is challenging for academic researchers to get fully integrated into SoL. Applied researchers fit in much better, in part because academic time frames are so much slower than most practitioner time frames. For example, SoL sometimes issues calls for research proposals. However, organizations in which the research would be done need for work to be done soon, rather than, say, after lengthy proposal writing and institutional review board approval processes.

“My experience is that while building links within these venues is sometimes difficult, it is extremely valuable. It is a chance for academics and practitioners both to get to know each other as people, to develop the possibility of more lasting connections, and come to know more concretely the kinds of challenges involved in linking the types of communication that may help meet the challenges.”

New types of such bridging institutions are arising out of new social media. We have been involved in distance teaching, podcasts, and other forms of interaction where we met practitioners at a distance and where they could discuss with us questions about the application of knowledge. These offer the potential for less formal interaction across boundaries that at one time would be been unbridgeable. These also offer the potential for people who define themselves as scholars more than scholar-practitioners to develop some experience linking with practitioners in informal ways.

Some Closing Reflections

By means of illustrative narratives, we have answered the questions we posed in the following ways. First, if scholar practitioners are to bridge gaps between scholarship and practice, they need to know scholarship; they have to have academic knowledge to convey. This doesn’t mean just citation-deep knowledge; it needs to be part of their practice. Second, especially given the initial scholarly emphases associated with OD, scholar-practitioners need to be attentive to systemic implications of any consulting work that is undertaken. Without systems awareness, work might be done that not only can sabotage an overall consulting effort but can also harm the organization. Third, we have suggested differences in ways of writing for academic and practitioner audiences. Skilled scholar-practitioners can do both types of writing. Fourth, OD scholar-practitioners need to be able to learn from practice and contribute their learnings to academic writing. Fifth, there are some formal bridging institutions between academia and practice. These are valuable, even as they reflect the difficulties involved in bridging scholarship and practice. It is worthwhile for consultants to be involved in such institutions in order to come to understand issues related to academic and practitioner approaches more fully.

We hope we have demonstrated that academia and practice have something to contribute to each other and that, though it is often difficult to accomplish, facilitating such joint contributions is important for improving both practice and the validity of our academic models of how human systems work.

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Jean M. Bartunek is the Robert A. and Evelyn J. Ferris Chair and Professor of Organization Studies at Boston College. She is a fellow and past president of the Academy of Management, and an associate editor of the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, as well as a member of the editorial boards of several other journals. Her research interests focus around organizational change and academic-practitioner relationships. She is the 2009 recipient of the Distinguished Service Award from the Academy of Management.

Ed Schein is the Sloan Fellows Professor of Management Emeritus at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He has published extensively—Organizational Psychology (3d ed., 1980), Process Consultation Revisited (1999), Career Anchors (3d ed., 2006), Organizational Culture and Leadership (4th ed., 2010), and The Corporate Culture Survival Guide (2d ed., 2009). He also wrote about Singapore’s economic miracle (Strategic Pragmatism, 1996) and Digital Equipment Corp.’s rise and fall (DEC Is Dead; Long Live DEC, 2003), and most recently he has published a book on the general theory and practice of giving and receiving help (Helping, 2009). He is the 2009 recipient of the Distinguished Scholar-Practitioner Award of the Academy of Management.