96198 - Organizational Change & Evaluation of Interventions

Learning outcomes

By the end of the course, students will know: - the main approaches to intervention design and evaluation tools in organizational settings, - the main techniques on organizational change and development, - the main contextual, intra-organizational, social and individual factors promoting or hindering change, - some of the main techniques used in planned change.

Course contents

The course will start at the beginning of the semester and will be given according to a calendar (communicated at the beginnning of the course), once or twice a week, and will finish by the end of November.

 

1. History of theories on organizational change

2. Levels of change: individual, (group), organization and system models

3. Characteristics of change agents and the consultancy process

4. Organizational diagnosis

5. Resistances and psychological reactions to change

6. Steps and components of organizational intervention design

7. Selected individual, group and organizational intervention techniques

Readings/Bibliography

Mandatory readings:

- Anderson D. (2017) Organization development: The process of leading organizational change, Thousand Oaks (CA): Sage.

- an empirical paper, selected from a list of papers (students will work in teams: each team will select an organizational change technique and will elbaorate on characteristics and possibility to use that technique).

 

Suggested reading:

Schein E.H. (2010). Helping: How to offer, give, and receive help. (chapters from 3 to 8) Berrett-Koehler Pub, San Francisco (italian edition: Le forme dell’aiuto. Milano: R. Cortina (the English version of the book is available as ebook on the Library website; the Italian one is available in printed copy in the Library)

Teaching methods

The course will use the following teaching methods:

- lectures,

- case study assignments,

- small group discussions,

- students’ oral presentation,

- practitioner's report/guest lectures.

Assessment methods

Evaluation aims to assess knowledge on the topic, academic and diagnostic competencies. Thus, assessing an organization (and designing an intervention) requires a good knowledge of principles on which change is based.

Learning will be assessed using the following assignments:

1. Knowledge test on theoretical aspects related to organizational change approaches and characteristics,
2. Team paper on an intervention technique, selected by a list of intervention techniques. Students will also prepare a poster (like in conferences) and such contents will also be presented during a "poster session".

The two assignments are both necessary for the final mark. The assignment A has to be typically delivered during the second part of the course, and the assignment B has to be shortly presented in class and delivered latest few days after the end of the course.

Each one of the two assignments is marked with a score from 1 to 30; 18 is the minimum to pass each assignment. The final mark will be slightly higher than the average of the two scores.

Teaching tools

The course will use one or more of the following teaching methods:

- lectures,

- audiovisual methods,

- video projector

- group case study.

Office hours

See the website of Salvatore Zappalà