Page 77 - DMGT520_ORGANIZATION_CHANGE_AND_DEVELOPMENT

Organization Change and Development

Notes vis-à-vis the clients. Three additional features deserve discussion: first, the elements of the action
research model that link it to the scientific method of inquiry; second, the collaborative relation
among scientists, practitioners, and laypersons that often is a component of action research;
third, the increased richness of knowledge derived from action research programs.
These steps for the scientific method are identical to the steps outlined by Corey for action
research.
The significant elements of a design for action research are:
 The identification of a problem area about which an individual or a group is sufficiently
concerned to want to take some action.
 The selection of a specific problem and the formulation of a hypothesis or prediction that
implies a goal and a procedure for reaching it. This specific goal must be viewed in
relation to the total situation.

 The careful recording of actions taken and the accumulation of evidence to determine the
degree to which the goal has been achieved.
 The inference from this evidence of generalizations regarding the relation between the
actions and the desired goal. The actions and the desired goal.
 The continuous retesting of these generalizations in action situations.
If the problem under attack is one of concern to many people, or if it is likely that the experiment
will affect many people, the action research should involve these people. It then becomes
cooperative action research.
An example applying action research to a typical organisational problem might be helpful.
Suppose that the problem is unproductive staff meetings – they are poorly attended, members
express low commitment and involvement in them, and they are generally agreed to be
unproductive. Suppose also that you are the manager in charge of both the meetings and the
staff and that you desire to make the meetings more vital I and productive. Following the action
research model, the first step is to gather data about the status quo. Assume the data have been
gathered and that the data suggest the meetings are generally disliked and regarded as
unproductive. The next step is to search for causes of the problem and to generate one or more
hypotheses from which you deduce the consequences that will allow you to test the hypotheses.
Say you come up with the following four hypotheses. Note that an action research hypothesis
consists of two aspects: a goal and an action or procedure for achieving that goal.

 Staff meetings will be more productive if I solicit and use agenda topics from the staff
rather than have the agenda made up just by me.

 Staff meetings will be more productive if I rotate the chair of the meeting among the staff
rather than my always being chairperson.
 Staff meetings will be more productive if we hold them once a week instead of twice a
week.
 I have always run the staff meetings in a brisk “all-business no-nonsense” fashion; perhaps
if I encourage more discussion and am more open about how I am reacting to what is
being said, then staff meetings will be more productive.
Each of these action research hypotheses has a goal, (better staff meeting productivity), and each
has an action, or procedure, for achieving the goal. Additional work would be done to clarify
and specify the goal and the actions.
Another distinguishing feature of action research is collaboration between individual inside the
system clients-and individuals outside the systems-change agents or researchers.

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