Activity # 1
Think of a recent change that happened in your organization. Try to focus on a large change, not just a small change in artifacts, such as a form. It might be a policy change, a change in leadership, a change in organizational goals. Think about how it was implemented.
Based on Kotter's 8 steps, describe the change. Did your organization follow each step? If so, describe how. If not, describe how "skipping" that step may have impacted the change and how employees responded to it. Use at least two class resources in your post. Remember to cite correctly.
Activity # 2
In chapter 16, Schein describes the three stages of change. How do they compare to Kotter's 8 steps of change?
https://www.kotterinc.com/8-step-process-for-leading-change/
299 A C O N C E P T U A L M O D E L F O R M A N A G E D C U LT U R E C H A N G E In Chapter Sixteen , I reviewed all the ways in which culture can and does change, noting how leaders can infl uence these processes. However, many of the mechanisms described are either too slow or cannot be conveniently implemented. Subcultural diversity may not be suffi cient, outsiders with the right new assumptions may not be available, and creating scandals or introducing new technology may not be practical. How then does a leader systematically set out to change how an organization operates, recognizing that such change may involve varying degrees of culture change? In this chapter, I will describe a model of planned, managed change and discuss the various principles that have to be taken into account if the changes involve culture. It is my experience that culture change is rarely the primary change goal even though it is announced as such. Instead, change occurs when leaders perceive some problems that need fi xing or identify some new goals that need to be achieved. Whether these changes will involve culture change remains to be seen. In the context of such orga- nizational changes, culture change may become involved, but the leader must fi rst understand the general processes of organizational change before managed culture change as such becomes relevant. The Psycho - Social Dynamics of Organizational Change The fundamental assumptions underlying any change in a human system are derived originally from Kurt Lewin (1947). I have elaborated and refi ned his basic model in my studies of coercive persuasion, professional education, group dynamics training, and management development (Schein, 1961a, 17 CH017.indd 299CH017.indd 299 21/06/10 5:21 PM21/06/10 5:21 PM C o p y r i g h t 2 0 1 0 . J o s s e y - B a s s . A l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d . M a y n o t b e r e p r o d u c e d i n a n y f o r m w i t h o u t p e r m i s s i o n f r o m t h e p u b l i s h e r , e x c e p t f a i r u s e s p e r m i t t e d u n d e r U . S . o r a p p l i c a b l e c o p y r i g h t l a w . EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 11/18/2021 4:02 PM via WESTERN MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY AN: 335269 ; Edgar H. Schein.; Organizational Culture and Leadership Account: s3701407.main.ehost 300 O R G A N I Z A T I O N A L C U L T U R E A N D L E A D E R S H I P 1961b, 1964, 1972; Schein and Bennis, 1965). This elaborated model is shown in Exhibit 17.1 All human systems attempt to maintain equilibrium and to maximize their autonomy vis - à - vis their environment. Coping, growth, and survival all involve maintaining the integrity of the system in the face of a changing environment that is constantly causing varying degrees of disequilibrium. The function of cognitive structures such as concepts, beliefs, attitudes, values, and assumptions is to organize the mass of environmental stimuli, to make sense of them, and to provide, thereby, a sense of predictability and meaning to the individual members (Weick, 1995; Weick and Sutcliffe, 2001). The set of shared assumptions that develop over time in groups and organizations serves this stabilizing and meaning - providing function. The evolution of culture is therefore one of the ways in which a group or orga- nization preserves its integrity and autonomy, differentiates itself from the environment and other groups, and provides itself an identity. Unfreezing/Disconfi rmation If any part of the core cognitive structure is to change in more than minor incremental ways, the system must fi rst experience enough disequilibrium to force a coping process that goes beyond just reinforcing the assumptions Exhibit 17.1. The Stages of Learning/Change. Stage 1 Unfreezing: Creating the Motivation to Change • Disconfi rmation • Creation of survival anxiety or guilt • Creation of psychological safety to overcome learning anxiety Stage 2 Learning New Concepts, New Meanings for Old Concepts, and New Standards for Judgment • Imitation of and identifi cation with role models • Scanning for solutions and trial - and - error learning Stage 3 Internalizing New Concepts, Meanings, and Standards • Incorporation into self - concept and identity • Incorporation into ongoing relationships CH017.indd 300CH017.indd 300 21/06/10 5:21 PM21/06/10 5:21 PM EBSCOhost - printed on 11/18/2021 4:02 PM via WESTERN MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use A C O N C E P T U A L M O D E L F O R M A N A G E D C U L T U R E C H A N G E 301 that are already in place. Lewin called the creation of such disequilibrium unfreezing , or creating a motivation to change. Unfreezing, as I have sub- sequently analyzed it, is composed of three very different processes, each of which must be present to a certain degree for the system to develop any motivation to change: (1) enough disconfi rming data to cause serious dis- comfort and disequilibrium; (2) the connection of the disconfi rming data to important goals and ideals, causing anxiety and/or guilt; and (3) enough psychological safety, in the sense of being able to see a possibility of solving the problem and learning something new without loss of identity or integ- rity (Schein, 1980, 2009b). Transformative change implies that the person or group that is the tar- get of change must unlearn something as well as learning something new. Most of the diffi culties of such change have to do with the unlearning because what we have learned has become embedded in various routines and may have become part of our personal and group identity. The key to understanding “ resistance to change ” is to recognize that some behavior that has become dysfunctional for us may, nevertheless, be diffi cult to give up and replace because it serves other positive functions. Psychotherapists call this “ secondary gain ” as an explanation of why we sometimes continue to live with our neurotic behavior. Disconfi rmation is any information that shows the organization that some of its goals are not being met or that some of its processes are not accom- plishing what they are supposed to: sales are off, customer complaints are up, products with quality problems are returned more frequently, managers and employees are quitting in greater numbers than usual, employees are sick or absent more and more, and so on. Disconfi rming information can be eco- nomic, political, social, or personal — as when a charismatic leader chides a group for not living up to its own ideals and thereby induces guilt. Scandals or embarrassing leaks of information are often the most powerful kind of disconfi rmation. However, the information is usually only symptomatic. It does not automatically tell the organization what the underlying problem might be, but it creates disequilibrium in pointing out that something is wrong somewhere. It makes members of the organization uncomfortable and anxious — a state that we can think of as survival anxiety in that it implies that unless we change, something bad will happen to the individual, the group, and/or the organization. CH017.indd 301CH017.indd 301 21/06/10 5:21 PM21/06/10 5:21 PM EBSCOhost - printed on 11/18/2021 4:02 PM via WESTERN MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 302 O R G A N I Z A T I O N A L C U L T U R E A N D L E A D E R S H I P Survival anxiety does not, by itself, automatically produce a motivation to change because members of the organization can deny the validity of the information or rationalize that it is irrelevant. For example, if employee turn- over suddenly increases, leaders or organization members can say, “ It is only the bad people who are leaving, the ones we don ’ t want anyway. ” Or if sales are down, it is possible to say, “ This is only a refl ection of a minor recession. ” What makes this level of denial and repression likely is the fact that the prospect of learning new ways of perceiving, thinking, feeling, and behaving also creates anxiety — what we can think of as learning anxiety , a feeling that “ I cannot learn new behaviors or adopt new attitudes without losing a feeling of self - esteem or group membership. ” The reduction of this learning anxiety is the third and most important component of unfreezing — the creation of psychological safety . The learner must come to feel that the new way of being is possible and achievable, and