Organization Development & Change: Publications and Presentations

November 18, 2020

Creating Safe Spaces to Unlock Employee Potential

Gary Gray, Doctoral Student in Organization Development & Change in the Schmidhorst College of Business - and - Director of Digital Enterprise Consulting at Siemens Digital Industries Software

Many organizations ignore the best assets they have, their employees. Companies pay employees a lot of money to perform jobs, be experts in their fields, be the eyes and ears of the customer, and know what is happening inside the organization. Still, the leaders and managers don't always listen to those that report to them, or only listen to a select group. After a while, managers may not even realize they don’t hear the people in their organization or community. Employees have a significant interest in the company doing well as a form of security and making a meaningful difference in the lives of those who use their products and services, but they are sometimes not willing to speak up. This talk is based on a presentation at the Academy of Management Meetings 2020 and a paper that has been recently accepted with revisions. The paper is the result of reviewing existing literature in the areas of workplace silence (psychological safety), organizational change, and safe spaces. The exploratory nature of this paper intends to identify areas of potential research for dissertation purposes. In this session, Gary Gray will connect the need for safe spaces to end the silence in organizations and communities so that change can open possibilities not realized in the past.

January 27, 2021

Spinning Wheels: How Resistance, Culture, and Assumed Continuity Interact to Paralyze a Company

Diane T. Keil-Hipp will present her article that details the development of a model that includes familiar OD concepts:  resistance to change, cultural lock-in, and assumed continuity.  Through the examination of behaviors that caused the demise of once-large companies, a model describing the behaviors was developed.  The Spinning Wheel model identifies three factors (called C³) that interact to paralyze a company, causing blindness to market forces.  This paper will provide a viewpoint that, in fact, small businesses suffer from spinning wheels just as do large corporations.  The severity is much the same; only the dollars on the income statement and employee count are smaller.  Through research and first-hand experience, the author provides evidence of the Spinning Wheel model’s equally relevant and crippling impact on small businesses.

February 24, 2021

Agile Engineering: Managing Change to Unleash Innovation

Brandon Rogers will present his article that details the interdisciplinary nature of OD by examining the structure of a behavioral-based change management technique and similarities related to the field of systems engineering.  Additionally, the concept of Agile tools and processes is explored as an integration point between OD and systems engineering to lay the groundwork for using a combination of the tools to stimulate innovation. Finally, an adaptation of the traditional software engineering V-model is introduced and explained step-by-step in the context of organizational learning and innovation.