smartwriter Please look at the sample attached

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Organization Development Intervention Paper

Overview For this assignment you will be required to analyze a real organization and develop a step-by-

step organizational development intervention strategy for potential use in this same

organization. Papers should explicitly and specifically invoke an OD perspective, and should

not merely consist of a set of general recommendations for improvement such as would be

found in, say, a business strategy or organizational behavior course. Specifically, your paper

should utilize terms, frameworks, and practices relating to the diagnosis of organizational

phenomena and to the theory and implementation of specific intervention strategies.

Subject to the constraint that no more than 10 projects may be completed within a

single section of this course, students may work individually, in pairs, or in groups of up

to 5 students. No groups larger than 5 are allowed without permission from Dr. Almond.

The paper should be uploaded as a single Word or PDF file through the course website.

Students must have direct contact with the organization being analyzed. Your current

employer would be OK (provided you can get the necessary permissions internally). A

RECENT former employer would also be OK (with the same conditions). An

organization that you have never worked for but to which you can gain direct access is

also OK. Examples here include a public library, your child’s school or Boy Scout Troop,

your church, your local coffee shop, and so on. However the organization you analyze

is selected, it is essential that you be able to collect sufficiently voluminous and

granular primary data to establish the groundwork for the interventions.

Organizations for which only archival or published data can be procured should not be

analyzed for purposes of this assignment. In other words, you can’t analyze Google or

Facebook based on articles you have read in the Wall Street Journal or Fortune. You

must have a contact at the organization, and you must be able to collect some form of

primary (i.e., first-hand) data from the organization.

Structure The basic structure of the paper will need to approximate the outline shown here. Note

that these points should NOT serve as the actual headings or sub-headings in your

paper. Additional guidance and details are given in subsequent sections below.

• Title Page: Be sure this includes the name (or a pseudonym) of the organization and a list of all of your group members. You can use a have more

in your title than simply the organization name. This should be on a separate

page.

• Executive Summary: 200 words or less; The summary should succinctly describe the problem(s), diagnostics, and your recommended interventions. The

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summary should appear before the body of the paper on a separate page. Write

this section as a succinct summary (not as a teaser trailer) so that someone who did

not have time to read your whole paper would still know what your paper was

about.

• Overview of the Firm: o provide a brief description of who the firm is and what they do o explain your connection to this firm, and how you gained access to

collect data

o include a detailed description of the organization’s presenting problems. In other words, what was it about this organization that made it seem that

it could benefit from your work?

• Diagnosis: o provide a detailed and rich description of your diagnostic procedure, the

diagnostic model(s) you used, the data collection method you used, the

information you collected, the data analysis method you used, the

results of your analysis, and the conclusion(s) you reached. This could

easily be the LONGEST section of your paper. Be sure to use

subheadings appropriately to avoid confusing your reader.

• Intervention: o provide a detailed description of the interventions you recommend for use

in the organization, your rationale for recommending them, and the

outcomes and benefits you expect from their use; each intervention

should address a specific issue highlighted in your diagnostic section, and

must be supported with at least one citation (see notes below on

Integration)

o please describe the intervention(s) you recommend for this organization. For each step in the intervention sequence, please include:

� the justification for this intervention FROM THE DATA, � the reason(s) why you chose this particular intervention, and � the expected outcome.

o this is the most important part of the presentation, so be sure you have ample support here. If you mention specific readings please be sure to

include a citation and a full bibliographic reference, as directed below.

o if you are planning to feed any of your findings back to the company, please describe how and when you plan to do this.

• Conclusion: o provide a brief summary of the paper that highlights key points (things you

want your reader to remember) and establishes that your work is important

and ought to be implemented.

Formatting You are free to use another style guide if you choose (MLA, APA, etc.), but for simplicity’s

sake I recommend the Academy of Management Journal Style Guide for Authors as the

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basis for formatting your paper, with one small exception: I would like year of publication

in your bibliographic entries to appear in parentheses, as in (2010). Pay particular

attention to guidelines for the use of headings, parenthetical citations, bibliographic

entries, and page numbers. Note that some sections mentioned in the style guide (e.g.,

how to present scientific hypotheses or display mathematical formulae) will not apply to

your paper. Also, the executive summary in the above outline will replace the abstract

mentioned in the style guide—i.e., there is no need to do a separate abstract. This style

guide is much simpler than other style guides (MLA, APA, etc.), and will still result in a

consistent and orderly appearance to the papers. A PDF of the style guide is available on

Blackboard.

If in the paper you refer to data collected from an actual organizational member, you must

cite each usage of this data. For example, if I was a student doing this assignment, and I

locally and in-person interviewed someone named John Crowe on March 12 th

, I would cite

the use of any information gathered during that interview within the paper with a

parenthetical citation (Crowe, 2013), and would include a simple bibliographic entry as

follows:

Crowe, J. (2013). Personal communication with the author on March 12, 2013. Killeen, TX

If I had spoken with John via phone, I would have written “Personal communication via

phone with the author…” and included John’s location at the end of the bibliographic entry.

And so on for email, text, webcam, and other modes of communication. If I had worked with

another student named Bill McPherson on the paper, I would list our names in alphabetical

order on the title page of the paper, and replaced “with the author” with “with the first

author” in the bibliographic reference, since my name would appear first in the author list on

the cover page.

Your papers should be double-spaced with 1-inch margins all around. I prefer 12-point

Calibri font (the typeface of this document). If you are using an older version of Word which

does not have this font you may also use Arial or Times New Roman. Use black text only.

Avoid the use of all caps, italics or boldface for general emphasis in the body of your paper.

These alternative typefaces are all are fine to use in your headings, as indicated in the

above-reference style guide.

There is no strict minimum or maximum page/word limit for this paper, although I would be

surprised to find excellent work (based on the following criteria) in papers comprising fewer

than 10 or more than 40 pages. These page guidelines apply to body text only. The title

page, executive summary, bibliography, and any charts or graphs you may wish to include

do not count toward the page total. If you include any charts be sure that it is clear who

created the chart and where the data came from. Include this information as a caption

directly below the chart or graphic.

Final papers must be delivered in a single document in Word PDF format. If your word

processor does not already have one, a free PDF converter is available online at

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http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/. Once installed, you can simply print (i.e.,

convert) your Word file to a PDF by selecting PDF Creator from the list of printers in your

Windows print menu. Papers should be uploaded to Blackboard as directed in the

instructions for this assignment on Blackboard. Doing this will allow you to verify that I have

successfully received your paper.

Evaluation Your work should be good enough that you would feel comfortable showing it to a boss,

colleague, prospective client or employer in order to provide an example of the high quality

of research, writing, and presentation that you are capable of. This paper will be evaluated

on the following bases: composition, comprehensiveness, integration, and utility. Each of

these is explained below.

COMPOSITION relates to how well the paper is written and put together. This includes both

stylistic and technical elements. Stylistic elements pertain to how well you represent or

render your ideas in written language, and include such things as the quality of your phrasing

and word usage as well as the creativity, precision, clarity, coherence, and expressiveness of

your thought. Technical elements pertain to your general mastery of the structure of the

English language, and include such things as spelling, grammar, syntax, sentence structure,

punctuation, as well as the use of paragraphs and introductory, concluding, and transitional

material.

COMPREHENSIVENESS relates to how thorough you have been in your research, as

evidenced by the breadth and quality of your citations and primary data source material. I

want to see rich, robust data here drawn from multiple sources and types, if possible. When

discussing data you have collected directly through interviews and observations, it would be

nice to see representative quotes and rich descriptions that make it clear that you have been

thorough in learning about the organization. It is impossible to persuasively recommend

specific interventions if you do not first establish for your reader the specific conditions that

call for them. But be selective here: don’t include ALL of your data. Since all of your

recommendations will also need to be justified by relevant precedent (see next evaluation

criterion), most papers will require several/many citations. You will also need additional

citations for all the descriptive and diagnostic information about the organization in the

paper. This applies regardless of where and how you got your company information—

whether directly from your interviews and observations or indirectly from publicly available

documents on the Web.

INTEGRATION relates to how effectively the evidence and precedents you have collected to

make your case are woven into the conceptual fabric (i.e., the argument) of the paper.

Interventions are often used in combination and in sequence to accomplish an over-arching

organizational development objective. For purposes of this paper, the inclusion of every

intervention must be supported by at least two “legs.” First, your description and diagnosis

from your data collection must make it clear that the intervention is called for. The case

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about Lincoln Hospital (to be discussed in class) does a good job of this. And second, you

must use citations from course materials (and possibly other OD-related readings you

find in your research) to establish that a particular intervention is effective to correct the

problem you have diagnosed. As an analogy, if this assignment were relating to helping

someone with a physical illness, you would need to follow these steps: describe the

symptoms the patient related to you, describe the diagnostic procedures you used and the

data you collected to identify the particular malady afflicting the patient (i.e., the source of

the symptoms), describe the treatments you prescribed to treat the problem, and justify the

treatment plan by citing the relevant journal articles or case studies establishing that the

particular treatment works on the diagnosed malady.

The Lincoln Hospital case reading is a good model of integration. However, while the

rationale for each intervention is explained in terms of what problem it addresses and what it

is intended to accomplish, no external justification (i.e., citations) of the interventions is

provided. You may have to do some digging to find relevant support for your recommended

interventions. Sources for such support include interventions posted on Blackboard or

discussed in your other readings (provided they provide anecdotal evidence of the effective

use of the intervention and not just a procedural description of the intervention), as well as

various organizational development websites, and academic and practitioner-oriented

journals. For the last of these I would recommend searching an online database such as

Business Source Complete, which is available through the TAMUCT library. Within the

TAMUCT library page 1 , click the Online Databases link, and then scroll down to Business

Source Complete. A good place to start might be to search for “organizational development”

in the Publication Name. Any article from any journal that contains this phrase in the title will

pop up, and you can scroll them for case studies and interventions that may help you.

UTILITY relates to how useful the focal organization would potentially find your paper. Much

of this will depend on the volume and quality of information you have amassed about the

organization as well as how meaningfully you have diagnosed the problems in the

organization. A good litmus test question to ask yourself is: “Would the focal organization

clearly see the value of this intervention strategy, and could the organization members

execute this particular intervention strategy using only this paper as a resource?” A good

answer is: “Yes, and yes.”

Additional Information Because of the nature and quantity of the data you will collect, you may have to make

some assumptions about the firm. You will of necessity be working with imperfect

information, but you should do your best to make the information as comprehensive and

detailed as possible. Whatever you do, be sure that your interventions are based on your

data: do not give me a cluster of interventions with no empirical basis.

1 http://www.tamuct.edu/departments/library/index.php

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You should write the paper as though you are addressing your instructor, not a member of

the focal organization. You should speak of the focal organization in the third person (i.e.,

refer to them as “they” or “the firm”), not in the first or second persons (i.e., don’t refer to

the focal organization as “you” or “we”). You should write the paper from the point of view

of a third-party organizational development practitioner, even if you are currently a member

of the focal organization. If you are a member of the focal organization, you should include

a footnote explaining this early in your paper. If part of your recommendations refer to

yourself as a member of the organization in question, be sure to mention yourself by name.

In other words, do call yourself “me.” For example, if I were writing about how to help the

School of Business improve its teaching, I might say, “we recommend that Dr. Almond

conduct a seminar on classical education methods,” but I would not say “we recommend

that I conduct a seminar…”

As mentioned above, students are permitted to work in small groups (no more than 3) on

this assignment. Each group member will receive the same grade as the other members of

his or her group, and each group will be responsible for policing the behavior and

contributions of its own members.

If you wish to conduct interviews with organization members you may need to request

formal permission from the organization to do so. Some individuals and organizations may

wish to protect the confidentiality of data you collect about them as well as the anonymity of

the individuals who provide the data. Furthermore, the organization may request a simple

document from you explaining what you are attempting to do, why you are doing it, what

sorts of information you may need, and who will have access to any data you collect. If you

are required to provide such a document, please attach a copy of this document to your

paper as an appendix. If the company does not want you to use their real name in the

document, please let me know in a footnote that you have changed the name of the

organization and of the individuals mentioned in the paper for this purpose. Also, when

conducting interviews, be sure you inform interviewees of your purpose, request permission

to record and/or quote them, and explain that they may request (and be granted)

anonymity if they wish to. If you have additional questions along these (or any other) lines

please contact me.