Libraries
and Organization Development
by Maureen
Sullivan
published June 20,
2005
Leaders
in today’s libraries face
significant
challenges in
the quest to ensure that their organizations perform at their best for
customers and that they provide a healthy and productive workplace for
staff. I find this to be true across all types and sizes of
libraries. Most of these leaders actively look for ways to
improve their library organizations.
Many informally adopt programs and
practices that are consistent with the principles and practices of the
discipline of organization development
(OD), without an awareness that
OD is an extensive set of programs and activities grounded in a strong
body of research. Formal strategic planning is the most
common example. In the past few years, however, several indicators have
emerged as evidence of greater and broader recognition of the value of
OD applications in libraries. The Summer 2004 issue of
Library Trends, titled, Organization Development and Leadership; the
formation of the LAMA LOMS Organizational Development Discussion Group;
and the establishment of the Organization Development Institute for
Libraries are some recent examples.
Organization
development, as defined by
French and Bell in the sixth
edition of their landmark book, Organization Development is
“the applied behavioral science discipline dedicated to
improving organizations and the people in them through the use of
theory and practice of planned change.” It is a process for
teaching people how to solve problems, take advantage of opportunities,
and learn how to do that better and better over time.” French
and Bell provide an excellent history of organization development from
its beginnings in the mid-1940’s to its current approaches
described by the authors as “second-generation OD,”
their term for “emerging concepts, interventions, and areas
of application.” Libraries began to employ OD
practices in the 1970’s as the second-generation OD efforts
were taking hold in other organizations. Among the first OD
programs in libraries were those developed by the Association of
Research Libraries (ARL) under the leadership of Duane Webster when he
was the Director of ARL’s Office of Management Studies. The
Management Review and Analysis (MRAP) program was the first and most
comprehensive. It led the way for the development of the
series of OD programs offered by ARL throughout the 1980’s
and 1990’s.
Leaders
of today’s libraries face
the challenge of creating
organizations that are dynamic, customer-focused, relevant, flexible,
and prepared for continual change. The 2003 OCLC
Environmental Scan: Pattern Recognition makes a compelling case for the
transformation of libraries – what they do and how they do
it. Such transformation calls for the application of a set of
OD practices and approaches that will help an individual library
accomplish extensive and deep change in its structure, systems,
culture, and people. Each library must design its own OD program, one
that will address its specific needs and one that will be feasible for
its own situation.
A
number of libraries have engaged in
some planned program of
organizational improvement, with strategic planning being the most
common one. Other examples of OD applications include: work redesign,
continuous quality improvement, team-based organizations, and a focus
on organizational learning. Experience with OD applications
in
in the past ten years has
led to the recognition that this discipline has much to offer as
library managers and administrators continue to face the need to find
effective ways to achieve significant change in the way they perform.
As the OD field has matured, a range of programs, tools, and approaches
has been developed for use in a variety of types of organizations.
Subsequent
articles will describe
specific OD applications and how they
might be effectively employed in libraries today. Where
possible, these articles will cite examples of libraries that have used
these applications and will provide guidelines and “lessons
learned” from these libraries. The next piece in
this series will focus on work redesign and will include stories from
the libraries at the University of Kentucky, Denison University and
Kenyon College (their collaboration to develop a shared technical
processing operation), and the Des Plaines (IL) Public Library. |
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