Page 113 - DMGT520_ORGANIZATION_CHANGE_AND_DEVELOPMENT

Organization Change and Development

Notes Survey Feedback is OD

The most important step in the diagnostic process is feeding back diagnostic information to the
client organisation. Although the data may have been collected with the client’s help, the OD
practitioner usually is responsible for organizing and presenting them to the client. A flexible
and potentially, powerful technique for data feedback that has arisen out of the wide use of
questionnaires in OD work is known as survey feedback. Survey feedback is a process of collecting
feeding back data from an organisation or department through the use of a questionnaire or
survey. The data are analyzed, feedback to organisation members, and used by them to diagnose
the organisation and to develop intervention to improve it.
Survey feedback is a major technique in the history and development of OD. It is a powerful
intervention tool and it can reach large numbers of participants. There are five general steps
included in a normal survey feedback. The first involves gathering members of the firm in order
to plan the survey. This is when the objectives of the survey is determined. The second step
involves a survey to all of the organisation’s members, rather than restricting it to managers
and coordinators. Next step would be to analyze the data reported through the surveys. In the
fourth step the data is feedback to the organisation. Finally, the rums should hold meetings to
discuss the feedback and try to determine what, if any, action is needed and how to implement
it. OD practitioners could be more involved in some of these steps by training to go to the firm
and help them interpret the feedback and devise intervention plans.

Limitations

There are limitations to survey feedback that OD practitioners should be aware of. These include:
 Ambiguity of Purpose: There can be disagreement over how the data should be analyzed
and returned.
 Distrust: OD practitioners need to ensure participants that their contributions are
confidential.

 Unacceptable Topics: Some firms have topics they do not want to explore, which constricts
the scope of the survey.
 Organisational Disturbance: This process may disturb the employees, and possibly the
whole firm.

7.9 Process Consultation

The concept of process consultation as a mode of inquiry grew out of insight that to be helpful
one had to learn enough about the system to understand where it needed help and that this
required a period of very low-key inquiry oriented diagnostic interventions designed to have a
minimal impact on the processes being inquired about (Schein, 1988). Process consultation as a
philosophy acknowledges that the consultant is not an expert on anything but how to be helpful
and starts with total ignorance of what is actually going on in the client system. One of the skills,
then, of process consulting is to “access one’s ignorance,” to let go of the expert or doctor role
and get attuned to the client system as much as possible. Only when one has genuinely understood
the problem and what kind of help is needed, can one begin to recommend and prescribe. Even
then it is likely that they will not fit the client system’s culture and will therefore, not be
refrozen even if initially adopted. Instead a better model of help is start out with the intention
of creating in insider/outsider team that is responsible for diagnostic interventions and all
subsequent interventions. When the consultant and the client have joint ownership of the change
process, both the validity of the diagnostic interventions and the subsequent change interventions

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