Practicing Organization Development (A guide for Consultants) - Part 18. 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 | COMPETENCIES OF OD PRACTITIONERS 141 does prepare leadership for the truth mean Similarly many generic items only appear in one section of the list. For example the item build trusting relationships only appears in the marketing section but could easily appear in other stages of the change process. The current list may therefore be constrained in its description of OD competencies. Third Sullivan s efforts have been qualitative and consensus building in purpose. He has been trying to get the field to develop and agree on the skills and knowledge necessary to practice OD. As a result the list hasn t been subjected to any sort of quantitative testing a requirement of any good competency modeling effort Rothwell Lindholm 1999 . We don t know for example whether contracting skills are any more or less important than implementation skills in successful OD practice. The time seems right therefore to apply a more quantitative approach to determine whether any structure exists within the list and to explore the relative importance of various competencies. STUDY METHODOLOGY To approach the purpose of this study to explore the structure and utility of the competency list generated by Sullivan and his colleagues the following methodology was applied. First the items were reviewed by the authors for use in a survey format. The items were screened for vocabulary jargon clarity assumptions and bias Emory 1980 Sudman Bradburn 1983 . In particular several items were double barreled and had to be split into two or more questions. For example one of the original items in the list was identify the formal and informal power in the client organization in order to gain further commitment and mobilize people in a common direction. This item was broken up into several items including identify formal power and confirm commitment of resources. On the other hand many items were considered redundant and eliminated. The final number of items used in this study was 141. Second the questionnaire
