Summary
Much attention has been given over the past several decades to enhancing OD as a profession. This includes but is not limited to the creation and refinement of core competencies for effective OD practice, practitioner certification processes, and academic preparation program accreditation systems. However, little if any literature has been devoted to how OD careers develop and flourish. This article reports on a study designed to address this gap in OD professionalization efforts. Based on in-depth interviews with 25 successful practitioners, a preliminary career development framework for those in OD and related professions is presented. It is posited that such a framework can assist OD professionals in their ongoing career development as well as provide researchers with some guidelines for future studies in this arena.
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Extract
The Development of Od Careers: A Preliminary Framework for Enacting What We Preach
The Development of OD Careers: A Preliminary Framework for Enacting What We Preach
A vast amount of scholarly and popular literature is devoted to factors that contribute to career success. Much of the former is based in whole or in part on a near century-old conceptualization of career success (Parsons, 1909). In essence, this framework holds that career satisfaction is the major factor comprising career success and that obtaining it requires a fairly straightforward process of linking key aspects of the self (e.g., interests and skills) with the requirements in the workplace. In other words, if one knows oneself and what is "out there," they can then simply look for a match between the two in order to achieve lifelong career success.On the other hand, as noted by Brown (2003), Ibarra (2004) and others, much of the popular career development and career success literature tends to be targeted on specific occupational groups (e.g., managers), professions (e.g., engineers), or workplace functions (e.g., sales, IT, operations, finance). In addition, much of this literature tends to be highly prescriptive while lacking empirical support for its claims of what constitutes career success and how it is achieved.Despite the plethora of career success literature, be it scholarly or otherwise, there appears to be surprisingly sparse coverage that is devoted specifically to occupations, professions, and functions that focus on "the people side of work organizations." Most assuredly this includes OD and related fields such as Human Resources (HR) and IndustrialOrganizational Psychology. Much of the literature t...See the full content of this document
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