ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a specialized one even within Organization Development (OD), and hence it is no wonder that little work on it may be found in the public administration literature. The basic focus is the issue of an optimum discrepancy for learning. That is, a discrepancy can exist between how a person behaves or believes and some challenging stimulus. The particular interest here is in optimum prior discrepancy, the discrepancy between what an individual would like on organization's climate or style to be and how the individual perceives that climate before an OD experience. Accelerating Model proposes that the greater the discrepancy between the stimulus of an OD intervention and an individual's anchors, the greater will be the tendency to move those anchors toward that stimulus. Decelerating Model implies that change in OD programs occurs more by assimilation than by contrast.
