| There are two predominant views in the organizational development (OD) world: The traditionalists who believe that OD should focus on promoting humanistic values within organizations, and the pragmatists who believe that OD should integrate the field's competencies into analytic and rationally based approaches of efforts, such as strategy formulation (Worley & Feyerherm, 2003). Many pragmatists take the position that properly applied OD has the capability to improve organizational performance dramatically, and that it is incumbent upon OD practitioners to focus on that goal. Unfortunately, many also feel that OD has historically failed to live up to this worthwhile potential (Bradford & Burke, 2004). Strategy is about finding ways for organizations to create sustainable competitive advantage (Hamel, 1996; Porter, 1996; Worley et al., 1996). Recently, however, there has been a realization that the current strategy paradigms have failed to consistently live up to their potential, and as a result, there have been calls for a new models and approaches to this process (Collis & Montgomery, 1995; Cummings & Angwin, 2004; Mintzberg, 1994).; This dissertation describes research that attempts to respond to both calls by applying an OD lens to the current strategy formulation ontologies to develop a new model that addresses some of the criticisms of the two major strategy formulation paradigms. The result was the Multi-Dimensional Strategy Model (MDSM). This new model was tested by submitting a strategy-formulation questionnaire to top-performing organizations and then using those responses to determine the degree to which the MDSM reflected reality. The results indicated that this model does indeed represent how top performing organizations go about their strategy formulation processes. Moreover, this same OD lens was also applied to analyzing how these organizations make sense of the various kinds of data that they incorporate into their strategy formulation efforts. These insights were then integrated into the MDSM to construct a new framework for conceptualizing the strategy formulation process that both answers the calls for new thinking in this area, and demonstrates that OD does have the ability to add value beyond just its traditional behavioral science roots. |
