Part I

INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW

Gervase R. Bushe and Robert J. Marshak

Organization Development (OD) has been a recognized form of organizational consulting and change and a scholarly discipline for almost six decades. Its antecedents date back to Kurt Lewin and his associates in the 1940s (Jones and Brazzel, 2014). As all textbooks on OD describe (Anderson, 2015; Cummings and Worley, 2014; French and Bell, 1978; McLean, 2005) it resulted from various streams of post–World War II thought, values, and action coming together, including planned change, action research, humanistic psychology, group dynamics, survey research methods, participative management, and laboratory education. These foundational theories and methods of OD led, in the 1960s, ...

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