Reference no: EM132220731

The Springfield County Office of Economic Development (OED) is responsible for attracting businesses to Springfield County and establishing a friendly climate for new and existing business owners. The OED advocates for out-of-state businesses to establish satellite offices in the county and thereby grow local employment opportunities. The management team consists of 12 managers who supervise regional departments in offices located throughout the county. The regional department staff works with potential client businesses to help them with land-use planning, site selection, local tax incentives, and more. The management team reports to Maria, the division director. Christina and Gilbert, organization development (OD) consultants from the county’s human resources division, have been asked by Maria to work on a team development intervention. In their initial meeting, Maria gave an overview of the organization and described the presenting problem to Christina and Gilbert. She had some concerns about the performance of her management team, and she wanted their help in developing an OD intervention to address her concerns. Specifically, she noticed that: Team members were highly intelligent, experienced, and competent in their jobs. Most had tenure with the division of more than 10 years. Team meetings had become awkward, with only a few members speaking. Some team members did not participate at all. Team members on multiple occasions had made commitments that they did not keep. When confronted about this behavior, team members became resistant and dogmatic. Maria used the words “passive-aggressive” to describe the team. Maria had one-on-one meetings weekly with each of her managers, and these meetings were very pleasant, even enjoyable. According to Maria, the team’s past performance had been quite good on an individual basis, with each region “doing just fine,” as she put it. However, Maria explained her concern that in the future, team members would need to work more closely together than they had to this point, and she questioned their ability to do so effectively. In the past, economic development managers would work on projects in their own regional area, but increasingly this was becoming a challenge. More projects were crossing geographic boundaries, and were thus involving two, three, or even four different regional jurisdictions, causing confusion as to which manager was responsible for the project. There had been instances of managers making conflicting decisions on a project, resulting in delays and frustration to the client businesses. Maria had proposed to the team several months

Based on what you know about the early stages of the organization development process (contracting, data gathering, diagnosis, and feedback), how would you evaluate the work that Christina and Gilbert have done to this point? What would you have done differently, if anything?