GB740 Unit 4 Organizational Assessment Plan Example

Records Before Conversations: A Unit 4 Organizational Assessment Plan for a Civil Engineering Firm

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

GB740: Organizational Development

Unit 4 Organizational Assessment Plan

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

Tallis Engineering, its staff and every figure are composite and illustrative; the model, the scale and the sources cited are real.

What the Assessment Must Show

The presenting problem is that closed projects at Tallis finished 2025 with a median margin 5.8 points below their proposal estimates, and that project manager turnover reached 19 percent. Unit 2 chose the Nadler and Tushman (1980) congruence model, which predicts that performance suffers where the components of an organization fit poorly with one another. Its specific prediction here is that fade concentrates on projects staffed from more than one office, because the work now crosses office lines while the formal organization still rewards each office separately. The assessment has to test that prediction, find out which formal arrangements produce the misfit if it exists, and leave room for explanations the model might miss.

Which Source Serves Which Component

Each data source is chosen for the component it can describe best.

The work and its outputs are described by project records. Finance holds, for each project that closed across those two years, the proposal margin, monthly estimates of margin at completion, final margin, fee, client type, change orders, and every office that charged time to the project. These records can show whether multi-office projects fade more, when in a project's life the fade appears, and whether change orders or fee size explain the difference.

The formal organization is described by documents and the survey. The office profit and loss statements, the bonus plan for office leaders, the project manager utilization target and the written staffing procedure, if any, will be gathered from finance and human resources. The survey will add how staff experience those arrangements.

The informal organization is described by interviews, the survey and observation. How offices actually negotiate staff, who calls whom when a project needs a specialist, and what people believe headquarters wants are matters that documents rarely capture.

The individuals are described by interviews and the survey: their skills, their sense of their role and their intentions to stay.

Sampling

The survey goes to all 640 staff. For interviews, forty people are chosen to cover the roles and office types most likely to see the misfit from different sides. Fourteen are project managers, seven from headquarters offices and seven from acquired offices, chosen to include managers of both single-office and multi-office projects. Ten are office leaders, covering every office except two whose leaders are new this year. Eight are technical staff who were loaned between offices at least twice in 2025. Four are project accountants, who see the monthly estimates and the arguments about them. And four are managers at public agencies who are Tallis clients on multi-office projects, so that the client's experience of coordination is heard.

Interviewees are chosen by the candidate from staff lists, not nominated by office leaders, so that leaders cannot steer the sample. Each person invited may decline without anyone learning they were asked.

The Instruments

The survey has three parts. The first adapts the role conflict and role ambiguity scales developed by Rizzo et al. (1970), which ask how clearly people understand what is expected of them and how often they face incompatible demands. These scales were chosen because the congruence model predicts that project managers on multi-office projects will experience exactly this conflict, answering to their own office leader and to the project's needs at once. The second part asks about specific arrangements: how staff requests between offices are made, how long they take and whether coordination hours can be billed. The third asks about intentions to stay and about the acquisitions.

The interview guide follows the four components, with questions about recent projects rather than general opinions. A project manager will be asked to walk through the last time they needed someone from another office, from the first request to the outcome. Interviews in acquired offices will include questions on how staff there see headquarters, so that the cultural explanation Burke-Litwin would emphasize can surface.

Observation covers six weekly staffing calls, in which office leaders discuss who is available and who is needed. The candidate will take notes on how requests are made and granted but will not record the calls.

Sequence

Records come first. The analysis of project margins will be complete before any interview is scheduled, for two reasons. Should the records show no extra fade on multi-office work, the interview guide must change before forty hours of conversation are spent on the wrong question. And if they do, interviews can ask about specific patterns, such as fade that appears in the third month of multi-office projects. The survey runs alongside the records analysis. Observation follows the survey, and interviews come last.

Reading the records before anyone is interviewed means the conversations can ask about what actually happened, not about what people remember happening.

Ethics and Data Handling

Survey responses are anonymous, and results for a role or office appear only where at least ten people answered. Interview notes are stored on an encrypted drive outside the firm's network and identified by code. No office leader will see any individual's response. Because the candidate belongs to the acquired water group, interpretations will be reviewed by a faculty adviser before they are shared with the sponsor, as agreed in Unit 3. Coghlan and Brannick (2014) note that insiders often know more than they can use without breaching trust, and the plan treats anything learned informally outside the assessment as off limits.

How Findings Return

The assessment ends with feedback, not a report on a shelf. Nadler (1977) argued that data collected from members of an organization should be returned to them in a form they can discuss, because discussion turns information into commitment to change. The plan therefore reserves a page for the feedback design that Unit 5 will develop: findings go first to the people who supplied them, in office sessions, before they reach the executive team.

References

Coghlan, D., & Brannick, T. (2014). Doing action research in your own organization (4th ed.). SAGE.

Nadler, D. A. (1977). Feedback and organization development: Using data-based methods. Addison-Wesley.

Nadler, D. A., & Tushman, M. L. (1980). A model for diagnosing organizational behavior. Organizational Dynamics, 9(2), 35-51. https://doi.org/10.1016/0090-2616(80)90039-X

Rizzo, J. R., House, R. J., & Lirtzman, S. I. (1970). Role conflict and ambiguity in complex organizations. Administrative Science Quarterly, 15(2), 150-163. https://doi.org/10.2307/2391486