Origin of OD
This researcher, often called the father of organization development, began the work that led to OD in the late 1930s.
Who is Kurt Lewin?
OD is described as a major approach to organizational change primarily in this geographical context, though it is spreading.
What is the Western world?
OD’s earliest tools—T-groups, action research, and participative management—are unified by their focus on this level of social interaction.
What is group behavior or group dynamics
In the 1990s–2000s, many practitioners wondered if this field “still existed” or had become “an out-of-date fad.”
What is Organization Development (OD)?
Named after their focus on in-the-moment group interaction, these unstructured training groups from the 1946 New Britain workshop became a foundational OD technique.
What are T-groups (or sensitivity training)?
OD in the 1960s emphasized democratic participation and personal growth, aligning with this anti-authoritarian social spirit of the era.
What is the hippy movement (or the countercultural movement)?
This foundational OD methodology uses iterative cycles of data collection and action to improve systems.
What is action research
This OD method—featuring the 4-D cycle—became one of the most prominent dialogic approaches, though still linked to action research and Lewinian roots.
What is Appreciative Inquiry (AI)?
Lewin’s Harwood Manufacturing Corporation projects are credited with refining these two key OD practices.
What are action research and participative management?
OD began adopting this organizational perspective, viewing companies as interconnected subsystems linked to their environments.
What is the open systems perspective
OD interventions often prioritize slow, collaborative methods, leading some critics in the 1980s to label OD as too incremental and too this.
What is participative approach?
New OD approaches were influenced by social constructionism—the idea that organizations are systems of negotiated meaning—and this related communication-based process
What is dialogue/dialogic OD?
This institute, founded after Lewin’s death and led by Benne, Bradford, and Lippitt, became the primary home of T-group training.
What is the National Training Laboratories (NTL) Institute
During this era, practitioners—rather than academics—began driving OD, shifting it toward commercial, results-focused solutions.
What are the 1970s and 1980s
A major shift in the 1970s–80s was moving from group norms and values to this more macro-level construct shaping how entire organizations behave.
What is organizational culture?
Dialogic OD and organizational storytelling draw heavily on this concept that organizations contain multiple perspectives and realities.
What is social constructionism?