The Library Leadership Network Commons

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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