Organizations constantly face the challenge of identifying, adopting and implementing necessary changes in order to stay competitive. An option for executing these changes is to contract an external management consultant with experience and expertise in organizational development. Our aim is to find if and how certain demographic variables of management consultants’ background affect how they identify an organizational development problem. This thesis is focused on management consultants within organizational development, and their responses when presented with a laboratory business simulation. There are limited generalization parallels to other consultancy areas and situations beyond the specific area of organizational development. We conducted a descriptive experimental study with 83 responding management consultants. Participants answered a questionnaire in combination with the presented business simulation, regarding how they identify problems based on their personal background. The data set was compiled statistically and rendered in IBM SPSS. Furthermore the answers were analyzed using multiple regression analysis and single correlation test statistics. We found that Management consultants showed a preference towards external environment as major contributing factor to the problem(s) at hand. Furthermore we found a positive relation to “Age” and “School”, and negative relation to “Work-life experience”. Consequently, management consultants do differ in their problem identification approach based on their personal background. With greater understanding of how management consultant differ, clients and supplier of management consulting services can better align consultants with organizational problem(s), in order to generate better synergy effect.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:hj-18170 |
| Date | January 2012 |
| Creators | Cau Nicklasson, Ronnie, Melinder, Johan, Törner, Sofie |
| Publisher | Högskolan i Jönköping, Internationella Handelshögskolan, Högskolan i Jönköping, Internationella Handelshögskolan, Högskolan i Jönköping, Internationella Handelshögskolan |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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