Many business organizations were founded in the first half of the 20th century. They enjoyed a period of relative stability in the environments in which they operated. Although organizations had to respond to some environmental influences, for the most part the economic and social order was relatively stable until the 1980s. I /Opsychology has an area of specialization devoted to the study of facilitating organizations to develop or change themselves in response to environmental influences. It is called organization development (OD). From the end of World War II (the mid-1940s) through the 1970s, OD was instrumental in helping those organizations that were, in effect, suffering from some “growing pains” in their own development.
For reasons discussed in Chapter 1, the business world began to change in the
1980s. Among the forces responsible for the change were the adoption and diffusion of computers into worklife, the changing cultural diversity of the workforce, the emergence of advanced communication technologies, the globalization of business, and redistributions of economic power. Using the “peg and hole” analogy, we can think of organizations as “pegs” that must fit into ever-changing business environments (the “holes”). There has always been a need for some organizations to change themselves in response to environmental pressures, but the past 20 years has witnessed an ever-growing and expanding need for all organizations to respond to the pressures placed on them by changing environmental conditions. What is different now than 30 years ago is (1) the greater strength of environmental pressures prompting change,
(2) the speed at which change must occur,
(3) the acceptance that responsiveness to change is a continuous organizational
process, and
(4) the pervasiveness of organizations caught up and affected by changing environmental conditions.
My home town has a family-owned ice-cream store that still sells ice cream the way it has for seven decades. On the surface it might appear that this little store has escaped the need to adjust in response to changes in the last 70 years. To a large extent this is true, although the store has been compelled to stock low-fat and no-fat dairy products to meet changing customer preferences. For the most part, this store is an “organizational dinosaur,” one of the last of a rare breed that has not had to change with the times.
I /O psychologists now fully recognize the broad-scale need for understanding organizational change. Church, Waclawski, and Berr (2002) noted that current organizational change strategies have become more grounded in business strategy, financial indicators, global trends, and customer research than interventions of a purely psychological nature.