Toward an Integrated Organization Development Consulting Model

Organization development (OD) is an applied behavioral, organizational, and social science. It is therefore a field of both scholarship and practice. Over the decades of the development of the field since the 1940s, different elements of scholarship and practice have emerged separately, leading to the fragmentation of a field that is meant to take a system-wide view of all forms of organizations into which OD scholars and practitioners intervene. The authors are scholar–practitioners who research and teach in the field. In the process, we have experienced the divergence of the field in that whether teaching in the classroom or building the capacity of mentees who are internal or external consultants, a variety of divergent sources are required to share a holistic picture of the knowledge required to build OD consulting practice skillsets. This chapter presents such an integrated OD consulting model that attempts to close this gap.