We live in an increasingly hyper-competitive global marketplace, where firms are fighting to stay lean and flexible in an effort to satisfy increasingly diverse and specialized consumer demand around the world. Additionally, with the shifting global economy in recent decades and the emergence of the technology and service-oriented knowledge organizations, how do organizations effectively drive positive change? How do organizations effectively foster a continuous learning and innovation culture, better motivate employees, and make sound organizational decisions? What can organizational leaders do to promote ongoing organizational agility that will have a measurable impact on increased firm effectiveness and employee productivity? How can organizations more successfully manage organizational knowledge to achieve strategic organizational goals and add value to all organizational stakeholders? These are just some of the pressing questions facing the organizations of today. Strategic Organizational Development and Change is a text that provides a comprehensive introduction to a broad range of organizational change topics and explores the wide sweeping impacts for the modern workplace, presenting a wide range of cross-disciplinary research and business cases in an organized, clear, and accessible manner. Additionally, unlike other organizational development and change texts, this book has a strong strategic management and practitioner focus. It will be informative to management students, academics and instructors, while also instructing organizational managers, leaders, and human resource development professionals of all types seeking to understand proven practices and methods to creating organizational systems and culture to promote ongoing organizational learning and innovation to drive firm effectiveness in an increasingly competitive global economy. This text was compiled, edited, and adapted from multiple open source textbooks and created under a Creative Commons License without attribution as requested by the work's original creator or licensee. For a free copy of the e-text, please visit HCIPress.org.
About the Author: Dr. Jonathan H. Westover is an Associate Professor of Management and Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Ethics at Utah Valley University, specializing in international human resource management, organizational development, and community-engaged experiential learning. He is also a human resource development and performance management consultant. Already a recipient of numerous research, teaching, and service awards and fellowships early in his academic career, Jonathan also recently was named a Fulbright Scholar and was visiting faculty in the MBA program at Belarusian State University (Minsk, Belarus), and he is also a regular visiting faculty member in other graduate business programs in the U.S., UK, France, Poland, and China. Prior to his doctoral studies in the Sociology of Work and Organizations, Comparative International Sociology, and International Political Economy (University of Utah), he received his B.S. in Sociology (Research and Analysis emphasis, Business Management minor, Korean minor) and MPA (emphasis in Human Resource Management) from the Marriott School of Management at Brigham Young University. He also received graduate certificates in demography and higher education teaching during his time at the University of Utah. His ongoing research examines issues of globalization, labor transformation, work quality characteristics, and the determinants of job satisfaction cross-nationally.