The Historical Phases of OD

Through the late 1970s, OD saw its most dramatic changes. The years since the late 1970s have been mostly marked by a search for role and identity within institutions.

Conception Phase (Late 1950s to 1963)

The roots of OD clearly draw on work from the late 1940s, when a group of Kurt Lewin's MIT researchers, led by Morton Duetsch, ran a workshop in New Britain, Connecticut, on race relations. In the process they discovered “experiential learning,” or the examination of group and individual behavior in the “here-and-now” to draw conclusions about group dynamics and individual behaviors. This led to the launch of the National Training Lab (NTL) at Bethel, Maine, where T-groups (“T” for training) and sensitivity training started in 1948. By the end of the 1950s, a number of the NTL leaders focused increasingly on taking the applied behavioral sciences into organizational settings. Early efforts by Richard Beckhard and Herb Shepard at Esso Research and Engineering (as it was then known) laid the foundation for later developments in the field. Others at the time began calling their consultation work “organizational development”; most notably, Robert Blake and Jane Mouton. By the early 1960s, OD groups had emerged at major corporations such as Union Carbide, Bankers Trust Company, TRW, and Esso (now ExxonMobil).

Pioneering Phase (1964 to 1973)

By late 1964, leadership began to emerge in the field. Researchers and consultants such as Richard Beckhard, Warren Bennis, Edgar Schein, Matthew Miles, Ronald Lippitt, Robert Blake, Jane Mouton, and Herb Shepard conducted key training, consulting, and research projects under the banner of OD. There was a missionary zeal coupled with an esprit de corps. The mid to late 1960s witnessed the development of the NTL Institutes Program for Specialists in Organization Development as well as the creation of graduate programs at institutions such as Case Western Reserve, that provided formal training in the field. Additionally, by the late 1960s many corporations had developed separate internal OD staff and some had created dedicated OD departments. By 1969 there was sufficient work in the field to support a series of OD books by Addison-Wesley, marking the increased regard for OD among academics. These books, and the prominent work in the field, straddled two streams of practice. The source of both can be traced back to OD's conception phase in the 1950s. The first focused on interpersonal relations and humanistic psychology whereas the second focused on organizations as systems. The latter stream emphasized dynamics of the change process, work processes, and structural change. By the late 1960s, these streams became differentiated and OD became clearly identified with the second stream, even though it continued to draw heavily on humanistic psychology.

The mixture of these two streams in OD contributed to a phenomenon that Andrew Pettigrew identified as the “single most pervasive source of tension” in pioneering an innovation—the tension between the missionaries and the pragmatists. The pragmatists lined up behind system change while the missionaries associated their original cause with humanistic psychology. OD literature began ignoring more mainstream work in organizational psychology at the time as both streams became more absorbed in the struggle to advocate their positions. While many research projects were framed by theories associated with one of the streams, individual practitioners moved more fluidly between the two.

Self-Doubt Phase (1973 to Early 1980s)

Many factors undoubtedly contributed to this phase in OD's history. The general societal pessimism brought on by the Nixon era brought an end to federal support for large-scale liberal social change research. Social changes, coupled with an economic recession, led to a general loss of appetite for OD activities. The promise of OD practitioners at the time to forge a better, more meaningful organizational life had been discredited in the eyes of some. This created increased pressure on OD practitioners to justify their existence.

In 1978, Noel's interviews with OD practitioners demonstrated that the field was “largely tinkering at the margins.” Implementation of OD projects within organizations was characterized by (a) a lack of involvement with strategic decision makers and (b) a follow-up role for OD practitioners in which they helped ease tensions created by strategic decision makers. The 1978 study concluded that OD would be increasingly marginalized unless it was revitalized into the mainstream of organizational effectiveness.

One example of mainstreaming OD was the U.S. Army's development of an Organizational Effectiveness School at Fort Ord in the early 1980s. The most promising officers rotated through the school before they were posted to two-year OD assignments. At the conclusion of these assignments, the officers rotated back to line positions. This had a profound impact on the U.S. Army, as colonels and lieutenant colonels were able to integrate OD practices into their operating roles. Although the military demonstrated a path for absorbing OD into mainstream management, most corporations were less deliberate in their efforts. As a result, by the early 1980s many organizations had eliminated OD specialists and departments. Only a few large companies such as Digital Equipment maintained such positions. At Digital, however, these positions became increasingly marginalized over time and were totally extinct by the time Compaq acquired the company in the 1990s.