MSM 6610 Chapter 16

organization development

A system-wide application of behavioral science knowledge to the planned development and reinforcement of organizational strategies, structures, and processes for improving organizational effectiveness

The continuous change process model

incorporates the forces for change, a problem solving process, a change agent, and transition management. It takes a top-management perspective and highlights the fact that in organizations today, change is a continuous process.

A learning organization

is an organization that facilitates the learning of all its members and continually transforms itself.51 In a learning organization, continual learning and change become part of the culture. Wikis, blogs, and searchable databases are sometimes used to collect employees' knowledge and make it available to others.

Habit

is easier to do a job the same way every day if the steps in the job are repeated over and over. Learning an entirely new set of steps makes the job more difficult. For the same amount of return (pay), most people prefer to do easier rather than harder work.

Unfreezing

is the process by which people become aware of the need for change. If people are satisfied with current practices and procedures, they may have little or no interest in making changes. The key factor in unfreezing is making employees understand the importance of a change and how their jobs will be affected by it.

Group Inertia

When an employee attempts to change his or her work behavior, the group may resist by refusing to change other behaviors that are necessary complements to the individual's altered behavior. In other words, group norms may act as a brake on individual attempts at behavior change.

Team Building

When interaction among group members is critical to group success and effectiveness, team development, or team building, may be useful. Team building emphasizes members working together in a spirit of cooperation and generally has one or more of the following goals: 1. To set team goals and priorities 2. To analyze or allocate the way work is performed 3. To examine how a group is working—that is, to examine processes such as norms, decision making, and communications 4. To examine relationships among the people doing the work.

A structural change

affects performance appraisal and rewards, decision making, and communication and information-processing systems. Reengineering and rethinking the organization are two contemporary approaches to system-wide structural change.

Threatened Expertise

A change in the organization may threaten the specialized expertise that indi-viduals and groups have developed over the years. A job redesign or a structural change may transfer responsibility for a specialized task from the current expert to someone else, threatening the specialist's expertise and building his or her resistance to the change.

The benefits gained from quality-of-work-life programs differ substantially, but generally they are of three types.

A more positive attitude toward the work and the organization, or increased job satisfaction, is perhaps the most direct benefit. Another is increased productivity, although it is often difficult to measure and separate the effects of the quality-of-work-life program from the effects of other organizational factors. A third benefit is increased effectiveness of the organization as measured by its profitability, goal accomplishment, shareholder wealth, or resource exchange.

Threatened Power

Any redistribution of decision-making authority, such as with reengineering or team-based management, may threaten an individual's power relationships with others. If an organization is decentralizing its decision making, managers who wielded their decision-making powers in return for special favors from others may resist the change because they do not want to lose their power base.

Another way to bring about system-wide organization development is through changes in the tasks involved in doing the work, the technology, or both. The direct alteration of jobs usually is called "task redesign."

Changing how inputs are transformed into outputs is called "technological change" and also usually results in task changes. Strictly speaking, changing the technology is typically not part of organization development whereas task redesign usually is.

organization development 3 points:

First, organization development involves attempts to plan organization changes, which excludes spontaneous, haphazard initiatives. Second, the specific intention of organization development is to improve organization effectiveness. This point excludes changes that merely imitate those of another organization, are forced on the organization by external pressures, or are undertaken merely for the sake of changing. Third, the planned improvement must be based on knowledge of the behavioral sciences such as organizational behavior, psychology, sociology, cultural anthropology, and related fields of study rather than on financial or technological considerations.

Resource Allocation

Groups that are satisfied with current resource allocation methods may resist any change they believe will threaten future allocations. Resources in this con-text can mean anything from monetary rewards and equipment to additional seasonal help to more computer time.

Management development programs

Management development programs, like employee training programs, attempt to foster certain skills, abilities, and perspectives. Often, when a highly qualified technical person is promoted to manager of a work group, he or she needs training in how to manage or deal with people.

Narrow Focus of Change

Many efforts to create change in organizations adopt too narrow a focus. Any effort to force change in the tasks of individuals or groups must take into account the interdependence among organizational elements such as people, structure, tasks, and the information system.

overdetermination, or structural inertia

Occurs because numerous organizational systems are in place to ensure that employees and systems behave as expected to maintain stability

Integrated Framework for Implementation of Task Redesign in Organizations

Step 1: Recognition of a need for a change Step 2: Selection of task redesign as a potential intervention Step 3: Diagnosis of the work system and context • Diagnosis of existing jobs • Diagnosis of existing workforce • Diagnosis of technology • Diagnosis of organization design • Diagnosis of leader behavior • Diagnosis of group and social processes Step 4: Cost-benefit analysis of proposed changes Step 5: Go/no-go decision Step 6: Formulation of the strategy for redesign Step 7: Implementation of the task changes Step 8: Implementation of any supplemental changes Step 9: Evaluation of the task redesign effort

Survey feedback techniques

Survey feedback techniques can form the basis for a change process. In this process, data are gathered, analyzed, summarized, and returned to those who generated them to identify, discuss, and solve problems. A survey feedback process is often set in motion either by the organization's top management or by a consultant to management. The survey feedback process has three distinct stages, which must be fully completed for the process to be most effective. As an organization development process, its purpose is to fully involve all employees in data analysis, problem identification, and development of solutions.

quality of work life

The extent to which workers can satisfy important personal needs through their experiences in the organization. programs focus strongly on providing a work environment conducive to satisfying individual needs. The emphasis on improving life at work developed during the 1970s, a period of increasing inflation and deepening recession. The development was rather surprising because an expanding economy and substantially increased resources are the conditions that usually induce top management to begin people-oriented programs.

Training

Training generally is designed to improve employees' job skills. Employees may be trained to run certain machines, taught new mathematical skills, or acquainted with personal growth and development methods. Stress management programs are becoming popular for helping employees, particularly executives, understand organizational stress and develop ways to cope with it. Among the many training methods, the most common are lecture, discus-sion, a lecture-discussion combination, experiential methods, case studies, films or videos, and online training modules.

Transition management

is the process of systematically planning, organizing, and implementing change, from the disassembly of the current state to the realization of a fully functional future state within an organization.18 No matter how much planning precedes the change and how well it is implemented, because people are involved there will always be unanticipated and unpredictable things that happen along the way. One key role of transition management is to deal with these unintended consequences. Once change begins, the organization is in neither the old state nor the new state, yet business must go on. Transition management also ensures that business continues while the change is occurring; therefore, it must begin before the change occurs.

Refreezing

makes new behaviors relatively permanent and resistant to further change. Examples of refreezing techniques include repeating newly learned skills in a training session and then role playing to teach how the new skill can be used in a real-life work situation. Refreezing is necessary because without it, the old ways of doing things might soon reassert themselves while the new ways are forgotten.

change agent

—a person who will be responsible for managing the change effort.