Unit 3: Team interventions and power in OD
Organizational Change and Development notes · PTU syllabus (MBA 931-18)
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Unit summary
Teams, intergroup relations and the whole organisation can each be the target of OD — and power shapes every intervention. This unit covers team interventions, intergroup and third-party peace-making interventions, comprehensive interventions, and theories of power and organisational politics in OD practice.
After this unit you can
- Explain team interventions
- Explain intergroup and third-party peace-making interventions
- Explain comprehensive interventions
- Explain power theories and organisational politics in OD
PTU syllabus topics
- Team interventions
- intergroup and third-party peace-making
- comprehensive interventions
- power theories and organizational politics in OD practice
Team building
Diagnose and improve team functioning
Role analysis
Clarify roles and expectations
Intergroup confrontation
Groups share perceptions
Third-party peacemaking
Consultant mediates conflict
Topic 1
Team interventions
Team building improves how a team works together — its goals, roles, processes and relationships.
Diagnostic meetings
Review how the team is doing
Role analysis technique
Clarify each member's role and expectations
Role negotiation
Agree what each needs from others
Process consultation
Consultant helps the team see its own processes
Responsibility charting
Who decides, approves, is consulted
- Process consultation (Schein): the consultant helps the team see and improve its own processes — communication, roles, decision making, leadership, norms.
- Gestalt approach to team building and visioning are further team interventions.
Topic 2
Intergroup interventions
- Purpose: improve relationships between groups whose conflict hurts performance (production vs sales, head office vs branches).
- 1
Leaders agree the process
- 2
Each group lists how it sees itself and the other group
- 3
Groups share their lists
- 4
Groups discuss discrepancies and causes
- 5
Joint problem-solving and action plans
- 6
Follow-up meeting
- Organisation mirror: a host group receives feedback from other groups about how it is seen.
- Partnering: building cooperative relationships with external partners or between units.
Topic 3
Third-party peace-making
- Richard Walton's model: a skilled third party helps two people or groups confront and manage their conflict.
- Conditions for success: mutual motivation, balance of power, synchronised confrontation, differentiation then integration phases, openness, reliable communication, optimum tension.
- Third party's role: neutral, process-skilled, controls the setting and agenda, encourages dialogue, summarises and helps agree next steps.
Topic 4
Comprehensive interventions
Search conference and future search
Whole system plans its desired future
Survey feedback
Organisation-wide survey fed back to work groups for action
Confrontation meeting (Beckhard)
One-day meeting of management to identify and act on problems
Strategic management activities
Strategic planning and change with OD values
Real-time strategic change
Large-group interventions
Grid OD (Blake and Mouton)
Six-phase programme based on the managerial grid
Appreciative inquiry
Discovery, dream, design, destiny
Large-scale systems change and transformation
Culture change, mergers
Example
In survey feedback, an employee engagement survey is shared with every team, which then discusses its own results and agrees on two or three actions.
Topic 5
Power theories and organisational politics in OD
- Power: the capacity to influence others' behaviour.
French and Raven's bases
Legitimate, reward, coercive, expert, referent (and information)
Resource dependence (Pfeffer and Salancik)
Power comes from controlling scarce, needed resources
Strategic contingencies
Units that handle critical uncertainties gain power
Mintzberg's power games
Insurgency, sponsorship, alliance building, empire building, budgeting
- Organisational politics: activities to acquire, develop and use power to obtain preferred outcomes where there is uncertainty or disagreement.
- OD and politics: OD practitioners must understand the power structure, gain sponsorship of powerful people, stay open and ethical, build broad coalitions and use positive (rather than manipulative) power.
Key terms
- Process consultation
- Helping a client see and improve its own processes
- Organisation mirror
- Feedback to a group from other groups about how it is seen
- Third-party peace-making
- Facilitated confrontation of conflict by a neutral party
- Confrontation meeting
- Beckhard's one-day problem-solving meeting of management
- Referent power
- Power from being liked and admired
Quick revision
- Team interventions: diagnostic meetings, role analysis, role negotiation, process consultation.
- Intergroup team building; organisation mirror; partnering.
- Walton's third-party peace-making; conditions for success.
- Comprehensive: future search, survey feedback, confrontation meeting, Grid OD, AI.
- Power bases and theories; politics; OD practitioner's stance.
Important exam questions
Practice questions written to the PTU exam pattern for this unit's syllabus: short answers (Section A style) and long answers (Sections B and C style).
Short-answer questions
- Q1.What is role negotiation?
- Q2.What is the organisation mirror?
- Q3.State two conditions for successful third-party peace-making.
- Q4.What is a confrontation meeting?
- Q5.Name French and Raven's bases of power.
- Q6.What is organisational politics?
Long-answer questions
- Q1.Explain team-building interventions in OD.
- Q2.Explain intergroup and third-party peace-making interventions.
- Q3.Discuss comprehensive OD interventions.
- Q4.Discuss power theories and the role of politics in OD practice.
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