HRE 530: Organization Development

This course introduces students to the field of organization development (OD), an area of practice and research in Human Resource Development. OD is concerned with creating, managing, and sustaining system-wide change in organization using education and social knowledge and practices to improve organizational, group, and individual performance. This course will introduce students to the history, philosophies, theories, techniques, and applications of OD. Alternating between OD case studies and OD theory, students will be exposed to the dominant models of OD application and major streams of research in the field. The course is organized around the Action Research model with its seven stages of start-up, entry, assessment and feedback, action planning, intervention, evaluation, and separation/adoption.