Exploring Association of OD Values with Organizational Perceived Effectiveness: Case of Small and Medium Enterprises

Abstract

A value culture always plays a significant role in organization development. Although the contemporary business organizations are gradually realizing the importance of these values in enhancing organization effectiveness, most of the organizations in Pakistan are still in dire need to adapt the values of openness, trust, authenticity and empowerment, collaboration and continuous organization learning in order to enhance organizational effectiveness and efficiency to survive or compete. Especially, the SME sector which constitutes a considerable part of Pakistani economy where majority of the firms have not been able to realize their full potential, the absence of value culture is constantly giving rise to low employee morale and less productivity and declining firms’ performance. Using goal theory of organization effectiveness, this study explores the association of four important OD values: employee empowerment, open communications, employee collaboration and continuous learning on the perceived effectiveness taking the case of 20 small and medium enterprises located in Karachi. A hypothetic-deductive approach is adapted to obtain the findings. The results support that open communication, employee collaboration and continuous organization learning are significantly associated with the perceived goal achievement levels of the firms. A positive but statistically insignificant association is observed in case of employee empowerment. The regression analysis indicates that the selected four OD values significantly contribute to the perceived organizational effectiveness on the given four important goals of the firm. The findings of this study do not only contribute to the organizational development, but would also help the government and the concerned authorities to devise strategies to develop and reinforce the value system in SMEs to deal with effectiveness and productivity issues in this major sector