CH17- Organizational Change
What are the different forces of change?
(1) Changing Nature of the Workforce: must adjust to immigration, multicultural environment, demographic, outsourcing (2) Technology (3) Economic Shocks: bankruptcy, acquisitions, recessions of companies ca affect jobs (4) Competition: must be able to develop new products quickly against other firms (5) Social Trends: changing, social media can bring more people to together to share cultures and ideas (6) World Politics: powers have changed and global market recessions.
What are the sources of resistance to change?
Individual Sources: Habit, Security, Fear of the Unknown, Economic Factors, Selective Information Processing; Organizational Sources: Structural Inertia, Group Inertia, Threat to Established Power Relationships, Limited Focus on Change, Threat to Expertise
What is organizational development? What do OD methods value? What is the emphasis and focus on?
Organizational Development (OD) is a collection of change methods that try to improve organizational effectiveness and employee well-being. It values human an organizational growth, collaborative and participative processes, an spirit of inquiry; borrows heavily from modern philosophy and how people see the environment. Underlying values: (1) Respect for people (2) Trust and support (3) power equalization (4) confrontation (5) participation
What impact does resistance to change have on the organization?
Resistance to change can be positive if it leads to open discussion and debate; open discussions are better than silence.apathy once it shows that the firm is engaged in the process of change. When members treat resistance only as a threat to be internalized, rather than as a point of discussion, it increases dysfunctional conflict. Not all change is good, it can lead to risky decisions, and have greater magnitude than expected.
How can you overcome resistance to change?
(1) Education and Communication: reduces employee resistance by reducing confusions, and can "sell" the need for change if phrased properly (2) Participation: expertise getting involved can be meaningful contribution (3) Building Support and Commitment: new-skills training, support groups to ease anxiety for workers can help, employees are also more accepting of changes that are committed tot he organization as a whole so firing employees to show commitment can emotionally commit them. (4) Develop Positive Relationships: people are most willing to accept changes if they trust the managers implementing them (5) Implement Changes Fairly (6) Manipulation and Cooptation: twisting acts to make them more appealing is manipulation, and combining manipulation with participation is cooptation, it seeks to "buy-off" resistance leaders by giving them a key-role in the change; Inexpensive ways. to get them on board, but you will lose all trust if discovered (7) Coercion: application of direct threats on the resistors with intent to follow-up on threats.
What are some techniques from OD to bring about change?
(1) Survey Feedback: assessing attitudes held by organization members, identifying discrepancies among perception and p;ving these differences. data from questionnaires become springboards for identifying problems and clarifying issues that may be creating difficulties for people. (2) Process Consultation: outside consultants to assist a client , usually and manager, to perceive, understand, and act upon process events with which the manger must deal; consultants guide the manger into the solving the problem by himself. (3) Team Building: organizational increasingly rely on teams to accomplish work tasks; this uses high-interaction group activities to increase trust and openness among team members, improve coordination efforts, and increase team performance.; includes goal-setting, identifying roles/responsibilities, interpersonal relations. (4) Intergroup Development: concern is dysfunctional conflict in groups; seeks to change group's attitudes, stereotypes, and perceptions about each other. Focuses on training sessions about occupation, departments, divisions in organization. emphasizes problem solving, groups meet independently and discuss problems then meet together and look for disparities in agreement, then integration phase develops solutions to improve relations between them. (5) Appreciative Inquiry: identify problem set or problems then look for solution, but accentuated the positives. Identify the most unquiet qualities and special strengths of an organization, which members can build upon to improve performance focusing on successes rather than problems (4 Steps) (a) Discovery: identify what are people's strengths (b) Dreaming: employees use information from the discovery phase to speculate on possible futures like what it will be like in 5 years. (c) Design: participants find a common vision of how the organization will look in the future and agree on its unique qualities. (d) Destiny: organization decides how to fulfill its dreams, they write action plans and develop implementations strategies.
What happens in Kotter's 8 step plan? How do his steps map onto Lewin's model?
Kotter built on Lewin's model by giving more steps to change that listed common mistakes that managers made while trying to initiate change. 1-4 are unfreezing stage, 5-7 are movement, and 8 is refreeze. (1) establish urgency by creating compelling reason for why change is needed (2) form coalition with enough power to lead the change (3) create new vision to direct the change and strategies for achieving the vision (4) communicate the vision through the organization (5) empower others to to act on the vision by removing barriers to change and encouraging risk taking and creative problem solving (6) plan for, create, and reward ST "wins" that move the organization toward the new vision (7) consolidate improvements, reassess changes, and make necessary adjustments in the new programs (8) reinforce the changes by demonstrating the relationship between new behaviors and organizational success.
What is Lewin's three-step model of change? How do you move from equilibrium to unfreezing?
Lewin argued that successful change in an organization should follow 3 steps: (1) Unfreezing: move from the equilibrium state of status quo to overcome pressures of resistance and conformity. This is done through Driving Forces, which direct behavior away from the status quo, Restraining Forces which hinder movement from status quo should be decreased, and combine the 2 approaches could work as well. (2) Movement: to be effective, organizations must move quickly, and those that build up to change tend to be less effective. (3) Refreezing: change will be short-lived unless implemented, and employees will revert back to previous equilibrium state. Stabilize new situations by balancing driving and restraining forces.
How can resistance of change surface?
Management can most likely handle Overt and Immediate Resistance like complaints, a work slowdown, or a strike threat. Greater challenge to manage Implicit or Deferred; These responses- loss of motivation, increased errors or absenteeism, are more subtle and more difficult to recognize what they are. Deferred actions may surface weeks, months, or even years later and thus cloud the link between he change and the reaction to it
How can you create a culture that embraces change and innovation? What are the sources of innovation? What are the structural barriers that promote it?
No guaranteed formula, certain characteristics surface repeatedly when researchers study organizations. Innovation is a specialized kind of change, isa new idea applied to initiating or improving product, process, or service; so all innovations imply change, but not all changes are innovation or lead to significant improvements. Structural variables have been most studied potential source of innovation: (1) Organic Structures: positively influence innovation; lower in vertical differentiation, formalization, and centralization, organic organizations facilitate the flexibility, adaptation, and cross-fertilization that makes adoptions easier. (2) Long Tenure: provide legitimacy and knowledge of how to accomplish tasks and obtain desired outcomes (3) Slack Resources: abundance of resources allow organization to afford to purchase innovations, bear the cost of instituting them, and absorb failures (4) Inter-unit Communication: high users of committees, task forces, cross-funcional teams, and other mechanisms that facilitate interaction across departmental lines. Organizations tend to have similar cultures, encourage experimentation, reward both successes and failures, and celebrate mistakes to a healthy degree.
