13.6. ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE

Two techniques, survey feedback and grid organizational development, can at times be useful in understanding organizational problems and ways to overcome them. These techniques require administering a questionnaire and working with different levels of management. This means an experienced consultant would be needed to help implement these techniques.

13.6.1. Survey Feedback

In this case a consultant distributes a questionnaire throughout the organization, the data collected are aggregated in a variety of ways and fed back to the organization, and the organization discusses them in several sessions. Much of the discussion turns out to be technical: It criticizes specific ways of doing things and indicates how they can be interpreted in different ways. The organization can obtain some benefit from this exercise, particularly when top management realizes that certain departments do have low morale, that communication upward is poor, that supervisors are really unaware of problems faced by subordinates, and that researcher ideas are not sought for organizational goal setting. Management can use survey results to focus on the problem and to introduce change using techniques such as team building.

13.6.2. Grid Organizational Development

This approach starts with top management and works through to the bottom of the managerial structure in an attempt to sensitize managers to the importance of the human factor and healthy relationships. Generally, managers are task-oriented (otherwise they would not have gotten there), so the emphasis on human relationships sensitizes them to a dimension that they tend to underuse. The approach also provides training in conflict management and is an opportunity to review policies and objectives, make plans, and evaluate changes that have already been made. In the hands of a good consultant this approach is quite helpful.