Common Behavior Changes in Successful Organization Development

The field of organizational development suffers from a lack of a unifying theory of planned organizational change. Diverse models and methods for achieving organizational change have made integration of research difficult, hampering the advance of the field. Identification of a “common denominator” to successful change efforts might begin to provide a focus ground on which diverse approaches could be organized. This paper proposes a model of the dynamics of organizational change interventions and suggests that individual behavior is a key mediating variable in those processes. It then presents a study that attempted to identify and specify common behavior changes characteristic of successful change efforts by surveying 42 top scholars and practitioners in the field. The study’s participants did report behavior changes common to their interventions and showed at least moderate agreement on what those changes were scholars and practitioners with differing theoretical and action perspectives did not differ in the behaviors they saw as resulting from their successful interventions.