Helping Organizations Help Others: Organization Development as a Facilitator of Social Change

Abstract

This article explores organization development (OD) interventions and their likelihood of increasing social change outcomes in public agencies. The central argument of this work is that public and nonprofit organizations can deliver better social outcomes by systematically engaging in OD interventions. An in-depth survey was conducted in 3 agencies of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania at the end of the gubernatorial administration of Tom Ridge (1995–2002). During his administration, Governor Ridge led the agencies of Pennsylvania government through a large-scale change effort to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of service delivery to the citizens of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The change effort was a remarkable event for the Commonwealth because no other governor in the history of the state had attempted to conceptualize and deliver a comprehensive large-scale change management initiative. The successes and setbacks served as a fertile context to shed light on the following research question: Do OD interventions increase the likelihood that public organizations will deliver better social outcomes? This question is important in that public organizations may need to engage in organization development activities to improve their internal operations, which in turn may help them provide exemplary social outcomes to those whom they serve. In short, organization development interventions might allow public organizations to help themselves to help others.

KEYWORDS:

• community
• organization development
• public sector
• quantitative

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this article was presented at the Society for Community Research & Action Conference in Montclair, NJ, June 19, 2009.

Notes

^a These data were not available. They are estimates provided by PennDOTs Bureau of Human Resources. Numbers in parentheses are percentages.

**All correlations for this grouping are significant at the .001 level.

^a these items were rated on a 1–5 Likert-type scale from Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree.

^b these items were rated on a 1–5 Likert-type scale from Not at All to A Great Extent.

^c these items were rated on a 1–5 Likert-type scale from Much Worse to Much Better.

**All R ² values are significant at the .001 level.

Several GOP governors had won by large margins in the 1994 elections with “reinvention of government” as one of their main policy objectives. These governors are George Voinovich (Ohio), Jim Edgar (Illinois), Tommy Thompson (Wisconsin), John Engler (Michigan), and Arne Carlson (Minnesota).