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Unit 12: Issues in Consultant – Client Relationship

Tannenbaum believes that many OD programs taper off because not enough attention has been Notes
given to helping people and units let go of matters that need to be laid to rest, to die. He believes
that in a real sense, facilitators should be able to assist in a mourning process, but to be of help,
facilitators must able to confront their own tendencies to want to hang on and their own
vulnerability.

Notes We also suspect that OD efforts frequently flounder because of internal power
struggles. The threat may be the practitioner or the OD effort or the threat may be wholly
unrelated to the OD Process.
Sometimes the organisation may simply be temporarily overloaded by externally imposed
crises occupying the attention of key people. Under such conditions the best strategy may be one
of reducing or suspending the more formalized OD interventions and letting people carry on
with their enhanced skills and then returning to the more formalized aspects at a later date.

12.8 Implications of OD for the Client

An OD effort has some fundamental implications for the chief executive officer and top managers
of an-organisation, and we believe that these implications need to be shared and understood at
the outset. Basically, OD interventions as we have described them, are a conscious effort on the
part of top management:

 To enlarge the database for making management decisions. In particular, the expertise,
perceptions, and sentiments of team members throughout the organisation are more
extensively considered than heretofore.
 To expand the influence processes. The OD process tends to further a process of mutual
influence; managers and subordinates alike tend to be influential in ways they have not
experienced previously.
 To capitalize on the strength of the informal system and to make the formal and the
informal system more congruent. A great deal of information that has previously been
suppressed within individuals or within the informal system (e.g., appreciations,
frustrations, hurts, opinions about how to do things more effectively, fears begins to
surfaced and dealt with. Energies spent suppressing matters cap now be re channeled into
cooperative effort.

 To become more responsive. Management must now respond to data that have been
submerged and must begin to move in the direction of personal, team, and organisational
effectiveness suggested by the data
 To legitimatize conflict as an area of collaborative management. Rather than using win-
lose, smoothing, or withdrawal modes of conflicted solution, the mode gradually becomes
one of confronting the underlying basis for the conflict and working the problem through
to a successful resolution.

 To examine its own leadership style and ways of manage. We do not think an effort can be
viable long if the top management team (the CEO plus subordinate team or the top team
of an essentially autonomous unit) does not actively participate in the effort. The top team
inevitably is a powerful determinant of organisational culture. OD is not a televised game
being played for viewing by top management; members of top management are the key
players.

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