Organizational Behavior
Chapter 15
Organizational changes

Lewin’s force field analysis model

Organizations operate as open systems that need to keep pace with ongoing changes in their external environment.
Successful organizations monitor their environments and take appropriate steps to maintain a compatible fit with new external conditions.
Employees in successful companies embrace change as an integral part of organizational life.

Force field analysis: Kurt Lewin’s model of systemwide change that helps change agents diagnose the forces that drive and restrain proposed organizational change.

• One side of the force field model represents driving forces that push organizations toward a new state of affairs.
• The other side of Lewin’s model represents the restraining forces that maintain the status quo. Resistance to change.

Stability occurs when the driving and restraining forces are roughly in equilibrium, they are of approximately equal strength in opposite directions.

• Change occurs by unfreezing.
  Unfreezing: the first part of the change process, in which the change agent produces disequilibrium between the driving and restraining forces.
• Moving to a desired condition
• Refreezing: the latter part of the change process, in which systems and structures are introduced that reinforce and maintain the desired behaviors.

Understanding resistance to change

Resistance to change takes many forms, ranging from over work stoppages to subtle attempts to continue the old ways.
Subtle resistance is more common than overt resistance.

Resistance is a common and natural human response.

Resistance is a form of conflict, but change agents unfortunately sometimes interpret that disagreement as relationship conflict.
Perversely, the change agent’s conflict-oriented response to resistance tends to escalate the conflict, which often generates even stronger resistance to the change initiative.

A more productive approach is to view resistance to change as task conflict.
From the task conflict perspective, resistance is a signal either that the change agent has not sufficiently prepared employees for change or that the change initiative should be altered or improved.
Employees might not feel sufficiently strong urgency to change, or they might feel the change strategy is ill-conceived.
Or they lack confidence to change or believe that change will make them worse of than the current situation.

Resistance is also a form of voice, so discussion potentially improves procedural justice through voice, as well as decision making through involvement.
By redirecting initial forms of resistance into constructive conversations, change agents can increase employee perceptions and feelings of fairness.
Resistance is motivated behavior, it potentially engages people to think about the change strategy and process.
Change agents can harness that motivational force to ultimately strengthen commitment to the change initiative.

Why employees resist change

Six most cited reasons why people resists change:

• Negative valence of change
  Employees believe that the new situation will have more negative than positive outcomes
• Fear of the unknown
  Uncertainty of organizational change is usually considered less desirable than the relative certainty of the status quo
• Not-invented-here syndrome
  Organizational change initiatives that originate elsewhere.
• Breaking routines
• Incongruent team dynamics
• Incongruent organizational systems

Unfreezing, changing, and refreezing

Unfreezing occurs when the driving forces are stronger than the restraining forces.
This happens by making the driving forces stronger, weakening or removing the restraining forces, or both.

Creating an urgency for change

Developing an urgency for change typically occurs by informing or reminding employees about competitors and changing consumer trends, impending government regulations, and other forms of turbulence in the external environment.

Creating an urgency for change without external forces

Leaders often need to begin the change before problems come knocking at the company’s door.
Creating an urgency for change when the organization is ahead of the competition requires a lot of persuasive influence that helps employees visualize future competitive threats and environmental shifts.
Employees may see this strategy as manipulative, which produces cynicism about change and undermines trust in the change agent.

The urgency for change can also develop through the leader’s vision of a more appealing future.
When the vision connects to employee values and needs, it can be a motivating force for change even when external problems are insignificant.

Reducing the restraining forces

Change agents need to address each of the sources of resistance.
Six of the main strategies:

Refreezing the desired conditions

Unfreezing and changing behavior won’t produce lasting change.
People are creatures of habit, so they easily slip back into past patterns.
Leaders need to refreeze the new behaviors by realigning organizational systems and team dynamics with the desired changes.

• The desired patterns of behavior can be ‘nailed down’ by changing the physical structure and situational conditions.
• Organizational rewards are also powerful systems that refreeze behavior
• Information systems play a complementary role in the change process, particularly as conduits for feedback.

Leadership, coalitions, and pilot projects

Lewin’s force field analysis overlooks four other ingredients in effective change processes:

• Leadership
• Coalitions
• Social networks
• Pilot projects

Transformational leadership and change

Effective change requires one or more change champions who apply the elements of transformational leadership.
A key element of leading change is a strategic vision.

• Provides a sense of direction and establishes the critical factors against which the real changes are evaluated
• Provides an emotional foundation for the change because it links the individual’s values and self-concept to the desired change
• Minimized employee fear of the unknown
• Provides a better understanding of what behaviors employees must learn for the desired future

Coalitions, social networks, and change

Change agents cannot lead the initiative alone.
Guiding coalition: several people with a similar degree of commitment to the change.
Membership extends beyond the executive team.
The guiding coalition is sometimes formed from a special task force that initially investigates the opportunities for change.
Members of the guiding coalition should be influence leaders. They should be highly respected by peers in their area of the organization.
But they alone may not generate sufficient commitment to change throughout the company’s workforce.

Social networks and viral change

A guiding coalition is a formally structured group, whereas change also occurs more informally through social networks.
To some extent, coalition members support the change process by feeding into these networks.
Social networks contribute to organizational change whether or not the change agent has a formal coalition.

Social networks are not easily controlled.
Some change agents have tapped into social networks to build a groundswell of support for a change initiative. Viral change.
In organizations, social networks represent the channels through which news and opinions about change initiatives and transmitted.

• Participants in that network have relatively high trust, so their information and views are more persuasive
• Social networks also provide opportunities for behavior observation

Pilot projects and diffusion of change

Many companies introduce change through a pilot project.
This cautious approach tests the effectiveness of the change as well as the strategies to gain employee support for the change without the enormous costs and risks of company-wide initiatives.

• More flexible and less risky.
• Make it easier to select organizational groups that are most ready for change.

Design thinking: a human-centered, solution-focused creative process that applies both intuition and analytical thinking to clarify problems and generate innovative solutions.

How do we diffuse the pilot project’s change to other parts of the organization?

• Employees are more likely to adopt the practices of a pilot project when they are motivated to do so.
  This occurs when the pilot is successful and people in the pilot project receive recognition and rewards for changing their previous work practices.
• Employees most have the ability to adopt the practices introduced in the pilot project
• Pilot projects get diffused when employees have clear role perceptions. How the practices in the pilot project apply to them.
• Employees require supportive situational factors

Four approaches to organizational change

Four leading approaches:

• Action research
• Appreciative inquiry
• Large group interventions
• Parallel learning structures

Action research approach

Action research: a problem-focused change process that combines action orientation (changing attitudes and behavior) and research orientation (testing theory through data collection and analysis).

Main phases of action research:

• Form client-consultant relationship
• Diagnose the need for change
  Analyze data
  Gather data
  Decide objectives
• Introduce intervention
  Implement the desire incremental or rapid change
  Incremental change: the organization fine-tunes the system and takes small steps toward a desired state
• Evaluate and stabilize change
  Determine the changes effectiveness
  Refreeze new conditions
• Disengage consultant’s services

Appreciative inquiry approach

Appreciative inquiry: an organizational change strategy that directs the group’s attention away from its own problems and focuses participants on the group’s potential and positive elements.

Positive organizational behavior: a perspective of organizational behavior that focuses on building positive qualities and traits within individuals or institutions as opposed to focusing on what is wrong with them.

Appreciative inquiry principles

Appreciative inquiry embraces five key principles

• Positive principle
  Focusing on positive events and potential produces more positive, effective, and enduring change
• Constructionist principle
  How we perceive and understand the change process depends on the questions we ask and language we use throughout that process
• Simultaneity principle
  Inquiry and change are simultaneous, not sequential
• Poetic principle
  Organizations are open books, so we have choices in how they may be perceived, framed, and described
• Anticipatory principle
  People are motivated and guided by the vision they see and believe in for the future

The four-D model of appreciative inquiry

Four stages

1. Discovery
   Identifying the positive elements of the observed events or organization
2. Dreaming
   Envisioning what might be possible in an ideal organization
3. Designing
   Dialogue in which participants listen with selfless receptivity to each other’s models and assumptions and eventually form a collective model for thinking within the team. In effect, they create a common image of what should be.
4. Delivering
   Participants establish specific objectives and direction for their own organizations on the basis of their model of what will be.

Depends on participant’s ability to let go of the problem-oriented approach.
Requires leaders who are willing to accept appreciative inquiry’s less structured process.

Large group intervention approach

Large group interventions adopt a ‘whole system’s perspective of change process.
They view organizations as open systems and assume that change will be more successful when as many employees and other stakeholders as possible associated with the organizational system are included in the process.

Large group interventions adopt a future-oriented positive focus.

But, involving so many people invariably limits the opportunity to contribute and increases the risk that a few people will dominate the process.

• These events focus on finding common ground, and this may prevent the participants from discovering substantive differences that interfere with future progress.
• Employees become even more cynical and resistant to change if they do not see meaningful decisions and actions resulting from these meetings.

Parallel learning structure approach

Parallel learning structure: a highly participative social structure developed alongside the formal hierarchy and composed of people across organizational levels who apply the action research model to produce meaningful organizational change.

Cross-cultural and ethical issues in organizational change

• One possible cross-cultural limitation is that Western organizational change models often assume change has a beginning and an ending in a logical linear sequence.
• The assumption that effective organizational change is necessarily punctuated by tension and overt conflict.

Some organizational change practices face ethical issues

• The risk of violating individual privacy rights
• Some change activities potentially increase management’s power by inducing compliance and conformity in organizational members.
• Some organizational change interventions undermine the individual’s self-esteem.