Leadership Challenges - Managing Change in Organizations

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Chris Argyris, John P. Kotter, market share, ROE, Coalition, Vision, Strategy for Change, communication

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Changing Organizational Culture Contd...

Changing the culture was absolutely necessary. But the founder himself believed in the old culture. Bringing in any change would have required a complete overhauling of the company's leadership, including doing without the founder himself. Bringing in new leadership might also result in the loss of the company's best engineers, and killing off many promising projects.

But despite the strains, the board decided to go ahead and overhaul the company. Without these changes DEC might have been history. The company's board fired Ken Oslen slashed the product line. It also fired most of its employees. Finally the company survived as an economical entity, but was an entirely different DEC. In the case of DEC, the company had to go through turmoil because it was not ready to change its cultural fabric when the market environment changed. As long as the survival of organization depends on its success in the marketplace, it has to pay attention to changing trends. Culture is a binding force that gives coherence to organizational efforts. It should propagate success and not failure. When it is not steering the company towards success, it has to be changed or abandoned, using all the available means.

Organizational culture is powerful, and changing it is difficult because people are selected and indoctrinated with a lot of care. And culture exerts itself through the actions and thinking of thousands of people. To change culture one needs to change all these people. Once a particular culture is set, it often develops further without conscious intent or knowledge. It becomes difficult to either challenge or discuss it. In order to change a cultural unit³ it is necessary to identify the group that is the culture's creator⁴, host⁵, or owner⁶. Systems thinking helps in identifying these and facilitates the change of culture.

TB.F. Skinner's⁷ theories highlight the importance of conditioning and positive reinforcement in nurturing the desired behavior. Organizational designers must design reporting structures, management and operating processes, and measurement procedures (such as setting targets, giving rewards) in such a way that they reinforce the desired culture. If there is no reinforcement of the company new culture, employees will not adopt the desired culture all the time.

Organizations often make the mistake of expecting their employees to change their culture without providing them the skills required to do so. Employees generally encounter problems in adapting general guidelines to their specific situations. To transform themselves, the first thing employees need is time. They rarely get sufficient time to change their behavior.

David Kolb⁸ demonstrated in the 1980s that adults cannot learn to behave in a desirable way just by listening to instructions. He showed that in order to learn, they have to absorb new information, experiment with it, and integrate that knowledge with their existing knowledge. Hence, teaching aimed at creating and nurturing new culture must give enough consideration to the time frame necessary. It should be kept in mind that large-scale change never occurs in a day or two. It is a slow and arduous process.

3] A unit where culture change is intended. The same as an organization.
4] Founding group of the culture.
5] The group that once did not carry this culture, but currently playing host to this culture.
6] The group that is responsible for the prevailing culture.
7] B.F. Skinner was an experimental psychologist, known for his experiments on rats in the 1920s and 1930s. He observed that rats could be influenced to behave in an expected way (moving in a maze in the right direction ) by providing incentives (posititve reinforcement) when they took the correct turn, and electric shock (negative reinforcement), when they took the wrong turn.
8] David A. Kolb is Professor of Organizational Behavior in the Weatheread School of Management, USA.