How does change affect the organization? - Chapter 15

When faced with organizational change, employee reactions may vary from resistance, compliance or commitment with change. Resistance to change has been associated with negative health, including insomnia and lower well-being. Leadership makes a difference: A study of planned organizational change in a hospital system found that authentic leadership influenced the processes of unfreezing, change and refreezing (Lewin's Three-Step Model of Organizational Change). For leaders, compassion is key, which refers to noticing, feeling, and understanding the suffering of a follower. Based upon this understanding, the leader takes action to alleviate the person's suffering. Leaders should promote compassionate organizational practices such as the prevention interventions that are discussed later in this chapter.

What are the forces driving organizational change?

There are many forces that may drive organizational change, such as:

• Workforce diversity: sex, race or ethnicity, cultural differences, LGBTQ, age or generation.
• The economy: recession, government policy, rising health care costs.
• Technology: mobile devices, social media, internet, security, robotics.
• Globalization: multinational corporations, political instability, fair trade, sustainability, outsourcing, emerging markets.
• Competition: global competition, mergers and acquisitions, customer standards, time to market.
• Life-threatening events: natural disasters, terrorism, pandemics.

Why is planned organizational change necessary?

The forces for organizational change have resulted in the need for organizations to be proactive instead of reactive in reading the environment they operate in. Planned organizational change can have a number of targets, including structure, technology, processes, teams and people. 

There are four types of planned organizational change:

• Incremental and reactive: putting out small fires, solve problems on a daily basis, quick fixes to short-term concerns.
• Incremental and proactive: tweaking, anticipate and plan, improve current ways of doing things, fine tune, guided evolution.
• Radical and reactive: stop the bleeding, crisis management, industry shakeups, economic turmoil, financial shocks.
• Radical and proactive: transformation, do things fundamentally differently, change of basic assumptions, revolution. 

Planned organizational change involves four organizational subsystems: formal organization, social factors, technology and physical setting. 

What is organizational development?

Organizational development (OD) is a collection of social psychology methods that are employed to improve organizational effectiveness and the well-being of employees. Examples of organizational development interventions are survey feedback, workout, process consultation, team building and appreciative inquiry (AI). The latter in an OD intervention that is based upon the basic assumption that people move in the direction they visualize for the future. Participants begin by reflecting on a peak experience and then engage in conversation about it with others in a group setting. AI may be an effective way to increase psychological capital as the participant needs to be competent and learn from others.

More recently, sustainability has become a target of OD interventions with an emphasis on preserving the environment.

How to overcome resistance to organizational change?

Resistance to change implies that the employee fights the change and tries to undermine it. Resistance to change has a negative impact on employee health. It has been related to insomnia and lower levels of well-being.

An article in Harvard Business Review offers the following guidelines to help overcome resistance to change:

• Being educated and communicating reduces misinformation about the change and helps convince employees that change is needed.
• Participation matters.
• Building support and commitment reduces resistance because employees have the support through counseling or sabbaticals to ease the strain.
• Develop positive relationships through trust in management increases commitment to operational change.
• Implementing changes fairly improves the chances that employees will accept change.
• Selecting people who are open to change, since research shows that people have personality traits that enable them to be more flexible when it comes to coping with change.

In addition, the articles provides some tactics, but they may backfire and should only be used as last resorts:

• Manipulation and co-optation tactics are sometimes used in organizational transitions, because they are relatively less expensive than the tactics listed above.
• Coercion should be used rarely, if at all. 

Which models for leading organizational change are there?

Lewin's Three-Step Model for Organizational Change is based on three steps in the change process: 

1. Unfreezing challenges the status quo by shaking up assumptions.
2. Changing represents movement toward a new desired state.
3. Refreezing the changes by reinforcing and restructuring in order to make the changes permanent.

Leadership makes a difference: A study of planned organizational change in a hospital system found that authentic leadership influenced the processes of unfreezing, change, and refreezing.

To implement organizational change using the three-step model, a force field analysis of the forces for and against organizational change should be conducted. The steps in force field analysis are as follows:

1. Define the problem (current state) and the target situation (target state).
2. List forces working for and against the desired changes.
3. Rate the strength of each force.
4. Draw a diagram (the length of the line denotes the strength of the force).
5. Indicate how important each force is.
6. List how to strengthen each important supporting force.
7. List how to weaken each important resisting force.
8. Identify resources needed to support forces for change and reduce forces against change.
9. Make an action plan: timing, milestones, and responsibilities.

Another important model for leading change is Kotter's eight-step model, consisting of the following steps:

1. Establish a sense of urgency.
2. Form a powerful guiding coalition.
3. Create a vision.
4. Communicate the vision.
5. Empower others to act on the vision.
6. Plan for and create short-term wins.
7. Consolidate improvements and sustain the momentum for change.
8. Institutionalize the new approaches.

Research has shown that executive leadership, top management support, is important during organizational change. A key attitude is commitment to change. Organizational restructuring and downsizing is one of the most challenging types of organizational change. By doing so, communication and fostering innovation helps to maintain employee morale.

What is stress and how does it relate to organizational change?

Stress is related to organizational change. Change is more likely to lead to stress when the change has consequences that threaten employees' sense of identity. 

Psychological job strain is defined as the combination of greater psychological job demands and lower job control. This results in organizational stress, which has been shown to have serious consequences to employees in terms of well-being and health. In addition, stress costs organizations billions of dollars each year.

Strains resulting from stressors trigger a stress episode. Responses may be psychological (high blood pressure, coronary heart disease, high cholesterol), psychological (anxiety, burnout, emotional exhaustion, fatigue) or behavioral (accidents and errors, alcohol use, caffeine intake, drug use, workplace deviance).

However, stress can also enhance performance. There may be an optimum level of stress for performance for some individuals, known as the Yerkes-Dodson law. It states that performance improves when stress is increased to an optimal point, but then the stress becomes too much and performance declines. There are two forms of stress:

1. Challenge-related stress: when work demands lead a person to be energized and work harder resulting in higher performance.
2. Hindrance-related stress: constrains or interferes with work performance.

How can roles cause stress?

Roles are behaviors that are expected of a person in a particular organizational context. People learn their roles in organizations and "act" them out on a daily basis. Roles can be a source of stress in various situations because they place demands on a person to fulfill expectations. Role ambiguity occurs when there is a lack of specificity or predictability about what the role of a person is. Role conflict occurs when there are incompatible demands regarding what a person's role is. For instance, the boss may want the employee to work late, but the employee's coworkers want them to leave when they do so they do not look bad (intersender role conflict). Role conflict may also occur when organizational requirements conflict with personal values (person - role conflict). A third form of role-related stress is called role overload, which is caused by too much work, time pressure and deadlines that a person feels unable to meet. Role overload may be quantitative (the number of demands) or qualitative (which refers to employees not having the qualifications to perform their work role). Other stressors related to roles are conflict with family roles (work life balance), work-school conflict, and family-to-work conflict.

How to cope with stress during change?

Coping refers to constantly changing cognitive and behavioral efforts to manage specific external and/or internal demands that are appraised as taxing or exceeding the resources of the person. Generally, there are two types of coping: behavioral methods (problem - solving behaviors, such as keeping a positive outlook, working harder, and seeking advice and help) and cognitive methods (managing thought and emotions, such as reordering life priorities and convincing oneself that work is not all that important).

In addition to these two methods, coping strategies can be problem-focused or emotion-focused. Together, these four dimensions yield the following coping strategies:

• Behavioral methods and problem-focused:
  • Working harder.
  • Seeking assistance.
  • Acquiring more resources.
• Behavioral methods and emotion-focused:
  • Engaging in non-work activities.
  • Seeking support.
  • Venting anger.
• Cognitive methods and problem-focused:
  • Planning and organizing.
  • Focusing on job duties.
  • Take one step at a time.
• Cognitive methods and emotion-focused:
  • Tell yourself you always come through.
  • Escape and detachment.
  • Convince yourself work does not matter.

Buffering effects (support during a stress episode) can result from social support, the help that people receive when they experience job demands. It is called the buffering effect because help from others serves as a buffer from stress and strain. Social support may be emotional or instrumental. Social support aids in stress management by building up the person's sense of identity and belonging, by improving self-image, and by enhancing the sense of control and mastery over the stressful situation.

Which organizational interventions and policies are there to help employees cope with stress?

Preventive stress management is a set of methods that promotes health at the workplace and avoids distress. There is a clear trend in organizations being more proactive regarding stress management. Many organizations have wellness programs that offer workshops on time management, weight loss, alcohol and/or drug abuse, smoking, cessation, and physical exercise. Research has shown that they minimally impact well-being and performance, but that they are in fact effective in helping employees cope with workplace stress. A final intervention is called employee assistance program (EAP) which may provide counseling, information, and referrals appropriate for treatment and support services.