ORGANIZATION DEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE (ODC)

The Organization Development and Change (ODC) Division invites your Professional Development Workshop submissions for the 2023 Annual Meeting, with all PDWs to be scheduled Friday, 4 August and Saturday, 5 August. We are looking for proposals that bring researchers and change agents together to address challenges and create positive change within organizations, between organizations, and in communities more broadly.  

We particularly encourage submissions that align with this year’s AOM theme: “Putting the Worker Front and Center.”  This theme spotlights tumultuous workplace dynamics in our post-pandemic world.  Spurred by complex forces (de-globalization, the Great Resignation, anti-workism, etc.), labor shortages and growing worker activism are upending life in organizations and society. The 2023 theme calls for scholarly contributions that address the nature and causes of these shifts and that produce insights to move us towards “human resource sustainability” and healthy, effective organizations.  To do this, we are urged to put workers “front and center,” not as objects of management efforts, but as knowing, active, choosing and resourceful subjects.    

ODC scholars, practitioners, educators, and students are well suited to this moment, as the ODC domain statement demonstrates.  The connective tissue of our inquiry is that of change and changing. We explore the strategies, processes, and outcomes of change at individual, group, organization, community, and institutional levels. Our essential values as a division have always held worker perspectives as central to building vibrant and humane organizations and communities.  

We invite you to consider questions such as the following, adapted and extended from the call of Peter Bamberger, 2023 AOM Program Chair: 

• What is the experience of work in different contexts and how is this related to institutional and organizational change in our post-pandemic landscape? 
• What approaches to organizing and change can facilitate human resource sustainability and organizational effectiveness?  How will this vary by context? 
• How can the field of OD help build the organizational and community capabilities needed to address the grand challenges we face now and in future? How can we leverage OD theory, practice, and insights to render grand challenges more accessible and actionable so that solutions can be imagined and enacted? 
• What new aims and forms of worker voice are emerging and how are these being used to catalyze, disrupt, or resist change in organizations? 
• To what extent and in what contexts might the apparent rising power of workers to drive or resist change in organizations be fragile or illusory? 
• How does a diversity, equity, and inclusion lens illuminate differences in worker aims, status, and power to advocate for change in organizations and institutions?  
• How do workers experience contemporary forms of management control (AI, digital surveillance, routines, etc.) and how do they act upon these forms of control to pursue their own interests? 
• What are the mindsets, skills, and capabilities needed for leaders in organizations to navigate changing workplace dynamics? 
• How can we evaluate the impact of change regarding worker absence (labor shortages, the Great Resignation, “quiet quitting”) and growing worker advocacy in the workplace?  

Submissions to the ODC division may address these - or other topics not necessarily relating to the annual theme - at macro, meso or micro levels of analysis.   

Think outside the box and propose innovative designs. PDWs may take the form of workshops, town hall meetings, debates, cafes, breakout sessions, round tables, research incubators – or new forms you may envision. We are open to a range of different topics and formats that will interest the ODC community. 

Successful proposals will be highly interactive, create an engaging environment, provoke new ideas and learning, and integrate cutting-edge scholarship with applied ideas, processes, and practices. Proposals should be inclusive of participants from a variety of perspectives and backgrounds. 

To submit to the ODC Division, please review the submission instructions and refer to the section on information for Professional Development Workshops. The submission deadline is Tuesday, 10  January 2023 at 17:00 ET (GMT-5/UTC-5), but earlier submissions are strongly encouraged. Before writing your submission, we also encourage you to review the ODC Division domain and mission statements. Please contact the PDW Chair, Jody Hoffer Gittell, with any questions about PDW submissions. 

Finally, we encourage all those submitting PDW proposals to sign up as reviewers for ODC! We warmly thank all those who contribute to our community and the quality and vibrancy of our program by acting as reviewers for the ODC Division. 

See you in Boston!