Action research in organizational development

For this assignment, first carefully review the required background materials. Make sure you are highly familiar with the main steps involved in action research and organizational development discussed in the readings. When you are finished reviewing the background materials, take a close look at the four scenarios below.

For each scenario below, think about the reasons why things did not work out well for the company in question. More specifically, think about which standard action research or organizational development step was not taken.

Your task for this assignment is not to explain what steps the organization should take—you would need to go into the company and do some lengthy action research in order to do this! Instead just review the standard action research and organizational development steps covered in the background materials and try to assess which key step was missing in the scenarios below.

Then write a 4- to 5-page paper addressing the following for each scenario:

What action research or organizational step was missing and
Why missing this step might have led to failure.
Make sure to discuss at least one of the required readings in your discussion of each scenario, and to cite all three of the required readings in your paper.

1. Sales have gone down at the XYZ Widget Corporation and nobody in the organization, including the CEO, seems to know why. They decide to hire an organizational development consultant to do some action research. The consultant and the CEO spend a lot of time discussing how to proceed and create a contract. The contract specifies that the consultant will limit his scope to finding factors that led to the decrease in sales and he will come up with a plan of action within one month. The consultant is busy with several other clients and doesn’t get much time to spend at XYZ. Facing the one month deadline, the consultant decides to repeat a recommendation he gave to several previous clients. The consultant then writes up a report recommending a large pay increase for the sales staff, which worked well for his previous clients. This change is carefully planned, and is implemented with strong support and enthusiasm from the sales staff. However, six months later sales are still down.

2. The Allmart Corporation is very concerned about the poor functioning of their inventory control and accounting processes. They hire a consultant who is an expert in this area who makes a good impression on them during the interview, and they immediately put him to work the day after the interview. The consultant conducts a survey with all employees in the accounting department and also has in-depth interviews with all managers in the department. The consultant shares his findings with Allmart’s top management team, and makes the primary recommendation that they implement a newer and more expensive accounting software package as he believes it is out of date software that is leading to inefficiencies in the department. Allmart’s CEO gets extremely upset that the client relied only on interviews and surveys and did not spend time directly observing the department’s accounting practices in action. Allmart ignores the consultant’s advice, and decides to hire a new consultant instead.