Kindred Todd and the Ethics of OD - Case

Ethical issues in OD involve how practitioners perform their helping role with clients. As a profession, OD always has shown a concern for the ethical conduct of its practitioners, and several ethical codes for OD practice have been developed by various professional associations. Ethical dilemmas in OD arise around misrepresentation, misuse of data, coercion, value and goal conflict, and technical ineptness.

In this case Kindred Todd who had just finished the master’s degree in organization development and had landed her first consulting position with a small consulting company. But Todd met a problem with ethics. After Todd was hired, her boss assigned her to a new client, and told her that they’re looking to them to help them address some long-range planning issues and from the way they talk, they could also use some continuous quality improvement work as well. But when Todd walked in to the president’s office of the firm, she found that her boss had sold her to the client as an “expert” in CQI, but of course she is not. And the members of the firm believed that an expert in continuous quality improvement ,such as Todd, was exactly the kind of help they needed to increase efficiency and cut costs in the core business. Members began to ask direct questions about technical details of CQI. But to Todd, she could just suggest that all of their questions were good ones, but that they needed to be answered in the context of the long-range goals and strategies of the firm. Because to Todd, she was not an expert who can solve those big problems, she had no choice but get more information of the history about the organization. After the meeting, Todd suggested her boss that her own competencies did not fit the needs of the client and requested that another consultant-one with expertise in CQI-be assigned to the project. But her boss do not want to change the person. And the boss response to her concerns included a strong, inferred ultimatum: if you want to stay with