Observations from a Long-Term, Survey-Guided Consultation with a Mining Company

Abstract

During a nine-year period, consultants conducted four attitude surveys with increasing levels of employee involvement in making feedback-guided behavioral science interventions with a large underground mining company. This consultation pattern emerged not from a conscious plan by the organization or its consultants but from a step-wise progression based on the successes and failures of previous interventions. The consultants derived models for the consultation process and survey-guided development from an adaptation of action research to OD interventions and from Argyris's perspectives on intervention, including his more recent analysis of "theories in action." This article describes the activities and progress that occurred during the period of the consultation, and the author discusses the changing organizational processes and the plausibility of linking them to organizational effectiveness and health criteria.