ABSTRACT
As organizations come under increasingly intense pressures to improve their effectiveness and ability to adapt to what Theodore Levitt (1991, pp. 70–72) terms “fast history,” organization development (OD) must also adapt and evolve new “helping strategies.” As French and Bell (1984, pp. 329–30) reflect
Probably the most serious handicap of OD as it has emerged historically has been its overpreoccupation with the human and social dynamics of organizations to the detriment of attending to the task, technical, and structural aspects and their interdependencies. In the future, organization development specialists must know much more about such matters as goal setting, strategic planning, and structural changes and must establish linkages with practitioners in such fields as management science, personnel psychology, clinical psychology, operations research, and industrial engineering to provide a broader range of options for organizational intervention.
