Guidelines for Overcoming Empirically Identified Evaluation Problems of Organizational Development Change Agents

Abstract

Several authors have written about the problems of conducting organizational development (OD) evaluations, but two inadequacies still remain. First, many of these problems are quite likely indigenous to the situations experienced by the writer in his evaluations, and they may not be widely applicable or generalizable to a large number of practitioners. Thus, one may be concerned as to whether these are the problems that OD practitioners can expect to experience in their OD evaluations. The second inadequacy is that the problems reportedly experienced by OD practitioners are rarely found in the literature on OD evaluations. In fact, only one or two problems are generally discussed, and these problems have been experienced by the researcher in a specific evaluation. Due to these inadequacies, a survey questionnaire, the OD Survey Questionnaire, was developed to ascertain the evaluative problems of OD practitioners. With the members of the OD Network serving as the survey population, questionnaires were mailed to 269 members. We classified 101 of the returned questionnaires from change agents as usable responses because the respondents indicated that they had previously conducted OD efforts. A total of 107 evaluative problems were identified and subsequently clustered into three problem categories, i.e., methodological, administrative, and miscellaneous problems. Subproblems of each category are discussed and some guidance for dealing with each problem is offered for those practitioners concerned with OD evaluation.