PSY 608: Organizational Development and Consulting

Goal: Evaluate organizational development theory, concepts, and practices used to manage the change process and the consultant role in designing change interventions.
Content: Growth and change within organizations can present unique challenges to individual employees, large groups, and the entire organization. Organizational development integrates theories, concepts, and practices from many areas of industrial organizational psychology to design and manage change interventions. These interventions utilize training, socialization, attitude change, team building, survey feedback, job redesign, restructuring, and system changes to help organizations address positive and negative forces for change. Consultants can work internally or externally to the organization to build supportive relationships with key leaders. They utilize problem solving, decision making, and communication skills to diagnose challenges, design survey instruments, manage change intervention processes, and evaluate intervention effectiveness. Students will utilize the ‘Top 10 Work Trends’ survey from the Society of Industrial Organizational Psychology to analyze organizational development intervention designs.
Prerequisite(s): Admission into the graduate program.
Credit: 3
Degree Level: Graduate