Organizational Change

Creating Change Through Strategic Communication

Laurie Lewis

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781119431312
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

A comprehensive guide to essential theories and practices of change creation and implementation

Organizational Change provides an essential overview to implementing deliberate and focused change through effective communication strategies. Author Laurie Lewis integrates academic rigor with real-world case studies to provide a comprehensive examination of both theoretical and pragmatic approaches to alterations and modifications of organizational structures. Emphasizing the importance of formal and informal communication in implementation of change, this text investigates methods of information dissemination and examines various channels for communicating change. Coverage of stakeholder relationships, concepts of uncertainty and resistance, assessing change outcomes, and more provides readers with a solid foundational knowledge of change dynamics in organizations.

Extensively revised and updated, this second edition provides new case studies on topics such as design of input solicitation, and current research in areas including the persuasive effects of sidedness or inoculation, and socially supportive communication. Improved pedagogical tools, streamlined organization of topics, and additional charts, graphs, and images reinforce efficient presentation of material and increase reader retention and comprehension.

• Examines empirical, theoretical, and conceptual approaches to strategic communication during organization change
• Explores key elements of change, appropriate communication strategies, and outcome evaluation methods
• Presents adaptive and programmatic strategic implementation models
• Provides studies of real-world companies and actual research on organizational change
• Debunks popular myths and clarifies misunderstandings of research and theory on implementation of change
• Demonstrates how Individuals, groups, and entire organizations can create change and influence implementation.

Organizational Change provides a thorough survey of the communication and implementation strategies, methods, and conceptual foundations of change in public and private sector organizations, suitable for undergraduate and graduate study and practitioners with interest in complex change implementation.

1
Defining Organizational Change

To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often

Winston Churchill

Life is change. Growth is optional. Choose wisely

Unknown

Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two

Octavio Paz, Mexican poet and essayist

As these opening quotations hint, change is often considered a sign of progress and improvement. Partly owing to a cultural value, organizations are under extreme pressure to constantly change. Zorn, Christensen, and Cheney (1999) make the case that “change for change's sake” (p. 4) has been glorified to an extent that it has become managerial fashion for stakeholders to constantly change their organizations. If it isn't new, it cannot be good. If we aren't changing, we must be stagnant. If we don't have the latest, we must be falling behind. If we aren't improving, we must be inadequate. These scholars go on to argue that the cultural and market pressures that demand constant change in competitive organizations can lead to disastrous outcomes including adoption of changes that are not suited to the goals of the organization; ill‐considered timing of change; dysfunctional human resource management practices; exhaustion from repetitive cycles of change; and loss of benefits of stability and consistency. It appears that this faddish behavior, like becoming slaves to any fashion, can lead to poor decision‐making and poor use of resources. For example, a case study of the collapse of Ghana Airways (Amankwah‐Amoah and Debrah 2010), evidence of the frequent change of top managers and leaders within the organization played a major role in its demise. From 2002 to 2004 Ghana Airways had five different government‐appointed chief executives. This pattern of change of leadership represented a sort of “ritual scapegoating.” Informants suggested that:

…the airline was treated as an extension of the public administration or government departments under the control of politicians who allot key management posts as political favors. None of the executives had sufficient time to develop and implement any strategy to address the negative profitability and to ensure the long‐term survival of the airline (p. 650)

The Role of Communication in Triggering Change

Communication plays a critical role in fostering the fad of change in organizations. We hear stakeholders in and around organizations making arguments that change is inherently good and that stability is necessarily bad. The continual use of language of change in terms considered positive – improvement, continuous improvement, progressive, innovative, “pushing the envelope,” being “edgy” – is juxtaposed against language of stability in negative terms – stagnant, stale, old fashioned, “yesterday's news,” “behind the times.” The rhetorical force of labeling in this way pushes an agenda that contributes to the faddishness that Zorn et al. point out.

Pressure to change also derives from complex organizational environments that put many demands on organizations to adapt and innovate. For example, current shifts towards a “gig economy” in many parts of the world may demand significant organizational changes in the ways labor is managed. The “gig economy” involves a market of labor based on frequent, independent, short‐term contracts and freelance work rather than longer‐term traditional jobs. Examples of those making use of this increasingly prevalent form of labor are transportation services, delivery services, video producers, couriers, household task workers, among many others. Numerous “gig platforms” that match employers and “giggers” have sprouted up including Uber, Lyft, HopSkipDrive, Airbnb, Postmates, TaskRabbit, Sparehire, Freelancer, and HelloTech (https://smallbiztrends.com/2017/02/gig‐websites.html). For the organization that makes use of these “giggers” there are certainly many implications for how they plan for, maintain relationships with, evaluate, and reward individuals who perform work for them. Benefits of engaging with these sorts of workers include flexibility, the ability to hire/fire at will, reduced costs for benefits, lack of the need to negotiate and honor long‐term contracts, and reducing needs for office space. However, the erratic nature of these multiple relationships, and the lack of continuity and long‐term employee–employer relationships surely brings new human resource challenges.

Oftentimes, the rationale that changing circumstances demand changing tactics, responses, and strategies makes it difficult for organizations to resist trying to do something new or at least appear they are doing something new. Change can be triggered by many factors even in the most calm of financial times. Triggers for change include:

• The need for organizations to stay in line with legal requirements (e.g. employment law, health and safety regulations, product regulation, environmental protection policies)
• Changing customer and/or client needs (e.g. changing demographics, fashions that spur desire for specific products and services)
• Heightened problems or needs of clients served
• Newly created and/or outdated technologies
• Changes in availability of financial resources (e.g. changes in investment capital)
• Funding agencies for nonprofits
• Administrative priorities for government agencies
• Alterations of available labor pool (e.g. aging workforce, technological capabilities of workforce, immigration)
• Trends in alternative labor arrangements
• Alteration of trade relationships or global economy
• Crisis in the industry, economy, government, or organization.

In addition, some organizations self‐initiate change and innovation. Change initiated within organizations can stem from many sources including the personal innovation of employees (individuals developing new ideas for products, practices, relationships), serendipity (stumbling across something that works and then catches on in an organization), and through arguments espousing specific directions that stakeholders in and around organizations think should be adopted or resisted. As stakeholders assert their own preferences for what organizations do and how they operate, their interactions produce both evaluations of current practice and visions for future practice that incite change initiatives.

Communication is key in triggering all change. In fact, we can easily argue that none of the other factors that trigger change are truly the direct cause for change until stakeholders recognize them, frame them in terms that suggest change is necessary, and convince resource‐holding decision‐makers to act on them by implementing change. That is, the necessity for change or the advantage of responding to changing circumstances is one that is created in the interaction among stakeholders. The process is subtler than we might assume at first glance. It is not as simple as noticing that the environment is demanding change or is presenting the opportunity for productive change. We actually need to piece together a construction of the environment that suggests this reality.

Karl Weick (1979) suggests “managers [and others] construct, rearrange, single out, and demolish many objective features of their surroundings” (p. 164). He calls this process enactment. In this process, stakeholders “enact” or “construct” their environment through a process of social interaction and sensemaking. As we encounter our world we attempt to form coherent accounts of “what is going on.” We do that by selecting evidence that supports one theory over the other – like a detective might in solving a murder mystery. However, the process is far from perfectly rational or a lone act of individuals. We have biases about what we want to be the truth of the matter and we are influenced heavily by the enacted realities of those around us (Weick 1995). Through communication we share our theories of “what is going on” and we purposefully or incidentally influence the process of enactment of others. As Weick (1979, 1995) argues, we simply forget some facts, reconstruct some to better fit the theory of reality we prefer, and look for supportive evidence to bolster our preferred case. He suggests that sensemaking is as much about “authoring” as interpretation.

In this way, communication plays a central role in surfacing or suppressing triggers for change. For example, a theory that the economy is in a downturn can be supported and refuted through different ways of looking at evidence, different ways of framing evidence, and constructing evidence through managing meanings that others attach to their observations. An alternate theory can reconstitute observations, history, and the narrative around these “facts” in ways that suggest not a downturn but a natural lull or a period of great opportunity. Perceptions that an organization is in a crisis; needs to be responsive to a particular stakeholder; is headed for greatness; exists in a time rich with opportunity; or any number of other characterizations are created through this process. As discussed more in Chapter 8, communication among stakeholders is at the heart of change processes in organizations because of this highly social process of making sense of what is going on and “spinning” it into narratives and theories of the world around us.

Failure in Change

Many attemp...