From Review to Framework: Conceptualizing Generativity for Organization Development

Abstract

During the last two decades, the term generativity and its adjective generative have acquired a modest place in the vocabulary of organization development practitioners and scholars; they describe generativity as an idea-giving, future-forming and self-perpetuating ambition of sustainable change and development. The literature review presented in this paper shows that this and many other interpretations of generativity in organizational contexts contain fragility, which may weaken the underlying aspirations of moving toward flourishing organizations. We promote a more robust and proper use of the term generative/ity. For this, we develop in this paper a conceptual framework that broadens our sight on generativity and its related concepts in the context of organization development. We offer suggestions for further research into strategies or interventions that have the fitness to strengthen organization's possibilities to adapt and survive. Can generativity be organized, and if so, how? We invented the word genarrative to address the ‘performative proficiency’ of organization development practitioners and (their) change leaders who strive for healthy, flourishing organizations. For an optimal return on organizational generativity we need scholars and practitioners of organizational development to join forces, mainly by adapting to the processual nature of generativity, and its seven manifestations.