Vodafone Organizational Development

There are a lot of definitions of organization development that are available today. However, one of the most used classical definition of OD originated from Richard Beckhard’s book, “Organization Development: Strategies and Models” that was published in 1969. He indicated that organization development is a planned, organization-wide, planned by the top management that aims to increase the company’s effectiveness through the use of planned interventions to the firm’s daily processes. Much interest has been drawn about Organization Development during the mid-1940s due to the activities done by Kurt Lewin, the Father of OD. He had good experiences with organizations in improving their productivity and performed consultancies particularly in the

Vodafone is a popular multinational telecommunications company in London. Globally, it has been identified as the second largest telecommunications company in terms of the number of subscribers and revenues in the past year (vodafone.com, 2014). Due to the lucrative and increasing number of people worldwide who uses telecommunication services, the industry has become more competitive which made Vodafone realize that they should remain to be innovative by improving the existing organizational culture. Instead of patronizing the “command and control” culture which harmed the relationships and activities of the employees, Vodafone opted to have a culture that is made up of empowered teams who are collaborating, agreed on mutual accountability, enable to make their own decisions and a common learning of things could be achieved. One of the core programs that was implemented in relation to this organization development was the leadership coaching program wherein top managers were asked to attend and learn skills related to conducting performance reviews, helping employees in goal setting and coaching. These managers were also given the chance to interact with a professional coach who helped them in polishing coaching goals and determine how

Modern companies have already realized that the environment has changed and they are continuously faced with more challenges, more flexibilities, more demands that is why, companies are utilizing organization development as a means of aligning with the challenging workforce and needs of the customers. Some of the trends would include: the increasingly complex environment and employee empowerment. The complexity of the workplaces today are brought about by the advancements in technology and the “borderless” environment. As a result, employees must be trained and refreshed regarding their jobs and update the skills and abilities they currently possess in order for them to be flexible and highly-adaptable should there be organization development activities to be planned out. They must also be culturally-competent, which could be achieved when employees are familiar with a couple of new languages and the cultures before immersing themselves to a foreign-based branch of the company. Another major trend in OD is employee empowerment especially in the area of decision-making. Some authors and researchers argued about Beckhard’s definition of organization development because they believe that employees should also be asked and considered in identifying measures to increase the effectivity and efficiency of the company processes, strategies and structures through