The Handbook of Organization Development in Schools and Colleges

This handbook is essential to any school group interested in developing and maintaining OD practices within its organization. The book's core chapters focus on clarifying communication, improving meetings, solving problems, making decisions, and working with conflicts. Those chapters are framed by others which define and describe applications of organization development, macrodesigning and microdesigning an OD intervention, and how to institutionalize OD in colleges and schools. While the book is best used as a reference, it is also a thorough survey of the theory, methods, and skills that an OD facilitator requires to be effective.OD interventions will generally take one of four macrodesign forms: (1) Survey-data-feedback (2) Training (3) Constructive confrontation and (4) Process observation and feedback. For each of these designs - which may at times need to be combined or reformed into complex macrodesigns - Schmuck and Runkel provide guidelines for planning an intervention. The goal of an intervention is not simply to solve the problem at hand - this would ultimately make an organization intervention-dependent - rather, to help the organization or a group within the organization enhance its capacity for improvement and change by focusing on the core processes of group work: Communication, meetings, problem-solving, decision-making, and conflict resolution. In the chapter Clarifying Communication, the authors focus on interpersonal communication skills. They provide methods for identifying and improving communication gaps within an organization. In Improving Meetings, they provide strategies to help groups develop the four features of effective meetings: A balance of task and maintenance functions, an emphasis on group oriented rather than self-oriented actions, the sharing of leadership roles, and necessary follow-through so that decisions result in expected actions. In Solving Problems, Schmuck and Runkel emphasize the process of moving from problem identification to target actions to implementation of actions. In Making Decisions, the authors describe how to enhance the capacity of an organization to develop a consensual approach to decision-making. In Working with Conflicts, Schmuck and Runkel identify the various kinds of conflicts that typically affect groups, and they describe methods and processes for enhancing the collaborative culture within an organization.This book is at once prescriptive and theoretical. Unfortunately, much of the research cited by the authors is dated. For anyone who needs an understanding of OD or specific strategies to enhance a group's capacity for improvement, however, this book is like few others in its scope and precision.