Rethinking ‘Organizational Effectiveness’ as a Core Premise of Organization Development: Beyond Narrow Organizational Interests and Towards Wider Soulful Interventions

Abstract

ABSTRACT We contend that the dominant focus within the OD discourse is on organizations and their success (i.e. a preoccupation with ‘organizational effectiveness’) at the expense of wider responsibilities and obligations, and that the framing of ‘organizational health’ is overly narrow and partial (i.e. what is healthy for the organization rather than what is ‘healthy’ at an individual or societal level). We offer some support for our assertion that OD initiatives focus too much on organizational effectiveness and organizational health and we discuss the scope for embracing a wider set of change imperatives. This involves distinguishing between ‘self-ish’ and ‘self-less’ behaviour and drawing a distinction between distributive and generative forms of change activity Finally, we conclude by briefly sketching out how this could take shape in terms of what we have chosen to call ‘soulful interventions’.