Practicing Organization Development (A guide for Consultants) - Part 15. Organization development (OD) is about planned change. As change has turned into the only constant, many managers and other people are pursuing change strategies with vigor. OD is a major strategy for leading and managing change at the individual, group, intergroup, organizational, interorganizational, and large systems levels. This book is about what it takes to be an effective change manager, change leader, and OD consultant | USING THE HRD AUDIT TO BUILD CONVERGENCE BETWEEN HRM AND OD 111 cafeterias supervise workplace security and generally oversee employee welfare. It is no mistake that in some British organizations the HR director is called the welfare officer. It is the legacy of this past. In the 1950s and 1960s modern human resource management was born. Following a difficult recession in the late 1950s economists and management thinkers alike began discussing the importance of the human side of the enterprise. These thinkers emphasized that organizations should do more to unleash employee potential and should focus their humanistic efforts made popular with the human relations school of management thought toward improving productivity. It was an appealing philosophy that still impacts many organizations to this day. The role of human resource management should be to create a work climate in organizations where individuals can realize their potential. The important focus of this role should be to strike a balance between organizational needs for productivity and profits and individual needs for increased autonomy. It was at this time that such terms as human resource management and human resource development were first coined to declare a new role for the old personnel function. But more recent thinking about HR has reflected different schools of thought. One view is that HR should shift its focus to become more strategic in its thrust relegating highly transactional efforts such as processing forms or record-keeping to outsourcing agents or downloading them onto managers or employees to carry out. Another view is that HR should shift its focus to become more oriented to human performance improvement or performance consulting which helps operating managers to troubleshoot and solve people problems that exceed their skills. A third view is that HR should shift its focus to help managers and workers to manage change and that role links closely to OD. One study of HR managers revealed
