Beyond Organisation Development

Emerging from Lewin’s original work, OD grew in the 1950s towards an identifiable field of practice that included action research, T-groups, systems thinking and process consultation. In the 1960s it was officially given its name (Shull et al. 2014a), and it became known as a practical intervention approach that improved the functioning of overly bounded, hierarchical organisations by regarding them as living, open systems (Marshak and Bush 2013). Throughout the 1960s OD also became more and more grounded in theory (Lewin 1948) and applied research (Marrow et al. 1967), with roots from a variety of practice areas including psychotherapy (Bion 1959), participative management (McGregor 1960), survey methodology (Likert 1967) and social psychology (Katz and Kahn 1978a). Since then, ideas, experience and intervention methods have enriched each other and expanded the field’s range of theories and approaches (Bushe and Marshak 2013a). From the 1970s on, OD was known as a field of research and application (Beckhard 1969). Later, during the 1980s, OD integrated insights from management and business studies and became a more interdisciplinary field just like, and overlapping with, hybrid fields such as organisation sciences, organisational behaviour and strategic management (Burnes and Cooke 2012). Since the 1990s, boundaries of the field have become even more blurred with the adoption of new practices and the growing popularity of closely related fields such as change management. Together with the recent ‘relational turn’ in the social sciences, many of the original ideas, methods and characteristics of the field of OD have converged into approaches to organisational change that differ in important ways, from earlier OD theories and practices (Van Nistelrooij and Sminia 2010a).