THE ORGANIZATION DEVELOPMENT PRACTITIONER

The second project, sponsored by the Organization Development and Change Division

of the Academy of Management, sought to develop a list of competencies to guide curriculum development in graduate OD programs. More than 40 OD practitioners and researchers worked to develop the two competency lists shown in Table 3.1.

First, foundation competencies are oriented toward descriptions of an existing system. They include knowledge from organization behavior, psychology, group dynamics, management and organization theory, research methods, and business practices.

Second, core competencies are aimed at how systems change over time. They include knowledge of organization design, organization research, system dynamics, OD history, and theories and models for change; they also involve the skills needed to manage the consulting process, to analyze and diagnose systems, to design and choose interventions, to facilitate processes, to develop clients’ capability to manage their own change, and to evaluate organization change.

The information in Table 3.1 applies primarily to people specializing in OD as a

profession. For them, possessing the listed knowledge and skills seems reasonable, especially in light of the growing diversity and complexity of interventions in OD. Gaining

competence in those areas may take considerable time and effort, and it is questionable

whether the other two types of OD practitioners—managers and specialists in related

fields—also need that full range of skills and knowledge. It seems more reasonable to

suggest that some subset of the items listed in Table 3.1 should apply to all OD practitioners, whether they are OD professionals, managers, or related specialists. Those items

would constitute the practitioner’s basic skills and knowledge. Beyond that background,

the three types of OD practitioners likely would differ in areas of concentration. OD professionals would extend their breadth of skills across the remaining categories in

Table 3.1; managers would focus on the functional knowledge of business areas; and

related specialists would concentrate on skills in their respective areas.

Based on the data in Table 3.1 and the other studies available, all OD practitioners

should have the following basic skills and knowledge to be effective.