The document discusses the values and ethics of organizational development (OD) practitioners. Traditionally, OD values have focused on humanism, trust, collaboration and self-control. Recently, values have also emphasized improving organizational effectiveness and performance. Joint values of humanizing organizations and improving effectiveness have received support. Challenges include conflicts between employee needs and organizational needs. Practitioners must have political skills to manage external relationships and value dilemmas. Ethical issues center around potential client abuse and letting personal values interfere with practice. Dilemmas include misusing data, technical ineptness, power/coercion, and conflicts in values/goals between the practitioner and organization.

1. The OD Practitioner
By: Kimberly Alesna

2. Professional Values

4. Values
Traditionally:
● Humanistic framework
○ Concern for inquiry and science, democracy, and
being helpful
○ Build trust and collaboration to create an open,
problem-solving climate and to increase the self-
control of the organization members

5. Values
Recently:
● Extension of Humanistic values
○ Concern for improving organizational effectiveness
and performance
○ To increase desire to optimize both human benefits
and production objectives

6. Joint values of humanizing organizations and
improving their effectiveness have received
widespread support in the OD profession as
well as increasing encouragement from
managers, employees, labor leaders and
government officials.

7. Challenges/Value Dilemmas
● Conflicts between employees needs for greater meaning
and the organization’s needs for more effective and
efficient use of its resources
● OD Practitioners are dealing with more and more
conflicts with powerful outside groups
○ Organizations are open systems and exist within increasingly turbulent
environment
○ Outside groups often have different and competing values in judging
the organization’s effectiveness

8. ● Practitioners must have not only social skills
like those proposed in the list of competence
skills by practitioners but also political skills.
● They must understand the distribution of
power, conflicts of interest and value
dilemmas inherent in managing external
relationships and be able to manage their own
role and values with respect to those
dynamics.

9. Professional Ethics

11. Ethical Issues in OD
● Concerned with how practitioners perform their helping
relationship with organization members
● Inherent in any helping relationship is the potential for
misconduct and client abuse
● OD Practitioners can let personal values stand in the way
of good practice or use the power inherent in their roles
to abuse (often unintentionally) organization members

12. Ethical Dilemmas
● MISUSE OF DATA
○ Mishandling, misinterpreting and manipulating data
or event using them to harm the organization or
individuals.
○ Making use of info to retaliate, take revenge, or place
individuals predicament under the guise of openess
and providing solutions to changes under study.

13. Ethical Dilemmas
● TECHNICAL INEPTNESS
○ To be technically incompetent is to commit errors
like coming up with wrong organization development
interventions, proposing organization development
interventions when the organization is ready for the
intended change or implementing organization
development interventions that are not aligned with
the set objectives of the organization

14. Ethical Dilemmas
● POWER AND COERCION
○ Forms of coercion happen when organization
members participate in organization development
interventions under intimidation and compelling
circumstances.
○ Manipulations in undertaking tasks, pressures in
making decisions and unfair placements on
dependency situations must be avoided

15. Ethical Dilemmas
● CONFLICTS IN VALUES AND GOALS
○ Conflicts in values and goals occur when there is a
discrepancy in organizational beliefs and attitudes,
when the organizational set goals are unclear, not
prioritized and too many;
○ And when the means to achieve these goals are
ambiguous and incongruous.

16. Thanks!
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