Sustaining Change in Organizations

Julie Hodges, Roger Gill

• Editore: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Anno: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781473911017
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Business
• Categoria: Organisational Behaviour

Indispensable to understanding change, this unique text provides a comprehensive examination of how change can be sustained within organizations today. Featuring critical insights into theoretical concepts and current international examples, the book provides an accessible way for students to enhance their understanding and develop the crucial skills need to be successful when managing and leading change in organisations.

Key Features:

• Synthesizes what is known about change in organizations and then provides practical ways of sustaining it
• Contains an international range of case studies and interviews which link theory to practice throughout
• Explores key contemporary topics such as power, politics, ethics and sustainability for an enhanced understanding of current debates and issues
• Activities, discussion questions and further reading in each chapter test your understanding of the key concepts and reinforce your learning
• End of book Glossary defines key terms, for those new to studying change.
• Comes with access to additional resources for students and lecturers including relevant SAGE journal articles to encourage wider reading

PART ONE

The Essence of Change and Transformation

1 Introduction to Organizational Change and Transformation

2 Theoretical Approaches to Change and Transformation

3 Leading Change

4 Managing Change

Introduction to Organizational Change and Transformation

1

Overview

• One of the main tasks of managers and business leaders across the globe today is to implement and sustain change effectively. This book will provide guidance to help business leaders, managers and students achieve this crucial task, through theoretical and practical perspectives. In the book we synthesize what is known about change in organizations and then provide practical ways of sustaining it, using perspectives from managers and leaders based on their experience.

• In this introductory chapter we briefly review the literature on organizational change. The literature varies in format and tone, encompassing descriptive accounts of change, theoretical models for analysing change, prescriptive models that aim to guide the change process, typologies of different approaches to change in organizations and empirical studies of the success or failure of various initiatives, programmes and tools. The literature can be broadly divided into populist and academic categories.

• Three concepts appear frequently in the literature and in discussions of organizational change. They are (i) change, (ii) transition and (iii) transformation. We define each of these in this chapter.

• This chapter also provides an overview of the aim and structure of the book.

• The range of approaches to change, and the confusion over their strengths, weaknesses and suitability, is such that the field of organizational change has been described as more an overgrown weed patch than a well-tended garden (Burnes, 2003: xii). This chapter outlines how this book brings together old and new material and perspectives, and how it goes further than other books in that it covers a breadth of issues pertinent to sustaining change in organizations.

A changing world

We are living in an age of accelerating change and turbulence. The magnitude, speed, unpredictability and impact of change are greater than ever before. Even the concept of change itself has changed. According to the Centre for Creative Leadership in the USA (CCL, 2012), change today is less a sudden and dramatic disruptive event and more a fluid and constant continuous process. Hammer and Champy (1993: 23) support this, in saying that ‘change has become both pervasive and persistent. It is normality’. However, despite the fact that change is constant, it seems that organizations are, in some cases, not getting any better at leading and managing it successfully. There is a widely held view that attempts to implement organizational change are predominantly unsuccessful (for example, Beer, 2000; Elrod and Tippett, 2002; Kotter, 1995; Pettigrew et al., 2001). As a result of this, the Number One critical issue for organizations today is, according to research by the Institute for Corporate Productivity in Seattle (2013), managing and sustaining change.

As Senior (2002) points out, no leader or manager needs convincing that improvement and change are at the top of the agenda and that the required experience and skills to do so are a necessity in order to survive in a highly competitive and continuously evolving and turbulent environment. Julie Meyer, the technology entrepreneur, puts her finger on the pulse of how the world is transforming. In her book, Welcome to Entrepreneur Country, Meyer (2012) compares the world’s transition in the 1930s and 1940s from a largely agricultural to an industrial economy with today’s shift, as the whole world moves to a networked, digital marketplace. Her contention is that in this new world, industries are being driven not by companies, monopolies and regulators but by competing ecosystems. Those who embrace this change, says Meyer, will emerge as winners. Her views are echoed by Howieson and Hodges (2014) in their book about leadership and change in the public and third sectors in the UK. The authors say leaders in both sectors need to recognize the drivers for change and develop the capability to cope with them.

Many of these drivers for change are coming from the external environment. As Fiona Graetz acknowledges:

against a backdrop of increasing globalization, deregulation, the rapid pace of technological innovation, a growing knowledge workforce, and shifting social and demographic trends, few would dispute that the primary task for management today is the leadership of organizational change. (2000: 550)

As Graetz points out, there are forces at work that are fundamentally changing the environment and shifting much of what we take for granted about employees, work and organizations. These forces include, but are not limited to: increasing globalization; shifts in the global economy; the continuing changes in the climate; profound changes in longevity and demography; rapid advances in technology; increasing competition; and the expansion of the knowledge economy (see Chapter 5 for a discussion on each of these drivers). The combination of these five forces is fundamentally changing organizations and how we work in them.

Many of the ways of working which we have taken for granted are disappearing, such as working from ‘9 to 5’, working with only one company in one’s lifetime,taking weekends off, and working with people we have known for years in the offices we go to every day. Changes are also happening in the way organizations operate. The idea that hierarchy is the best way to manage information flows is disappearing in many companies, as are the notions that most people will work with team members in the same office and that the majority of talent will be held within the boundaries of the organization. Despite these and other changes, organizations still seem to be struggling to sustain change.

It may seem paradoxical that, on the one hand, the failure rate of change initiatives appears to be immense while, on the other hand, there is now more advice on how to lead and manage change than ever before. In opposition to this, there is a growing body of research which questions whether it is possible to meaningfully ‘manage’ change at all (Hughes, 2006). This school of thought questions the ability to manage and control change on the basis of the inherent complexity of organizations and the self-organizing properties of systems (Shaw, 2002; Stacey, 2001). Change is seen not as an entity to be conquered, outwitted or prevented, but as an ongoing process that is never completed (Bruhn, 2004). What is evident, as Luecke (2003) points out, is that a state of continuous change has become a constant, with change an ever-present feature of organizational life, at both an operational and a strategic level, which individuals within organizations need to cope with.

The pace of change that affects organizations today may or may not be unprecedented but it is certainly spectacular, and likely to accelerate in the future. But like most things in business, rapid change is a two-edged sword – a threat but also an opportunity. Change puts a premium on adapting; the faster the pace of change, the greater the premium. Take away change and there is no need to adapt; if it worked yesterday, there is every reason to believe it will work today. Alas, that is not remotely what organizations are now facing. Today’s business conditions give new meaning to the words of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus: ‘All is flux, nothing stays still – there is nothing permanent except change.’

Organizations that adapt to rapid change better than their competitors make great strides, while those that ignore rapidly changing circumstances might go the way of the dinosaur. Sixty million years ago, dinosaurs suddenly disappeared after more than 100 million years on the planet. Palaeontologists hotly debate the cause of the dinosaurs’ extinction, but high on the list of hypotheses is their failure to adapt to rapidly changing climatic conditions. There is a long trail of companies who have gone the way of the dinosaurs: not adapting to change, they have either declined swiftly or agonizingly slowly over a long period of time.

An organization’s ability to change is essential for its survival in a changing market environment. Companies such as ABB, AT&T, DaimlerChrysler, France Telecom, Time Warner and Vivendi Universal have all witnessed failure in recent decades. As Probst and Raisch (2005) point out, the lack of change can lead to increasingly outdated product offerings and cost structures significantly above the competitive level. A prime example of a company that failed to adapt is Eastman Kodak. To protect its core film business, the company ignored the trend to digital photography. Kodak’s competition therefore profited from the growth market in digital photography. At Xerox, the American giant in the copier business, something similar occurred. Although the crucial products of the digital age had been developed in their own research laboratories, Xerox focused exclusively on the core copier business. The copier market is nevertheless decreasing constantly, and Xerox has lost market share to cheaper producers.

The challenge for leaders and managers is to understand, lead and manage change so that it is shaped and sustained in a way that benefits the organization and its stakeholders. How to sustain change is not, however, a new issue. As far back as the 1940s, Kurt Lewin (1947) argued that all too often change is short-lived: after a ‘shot in the arm’, life returns to the way it was before. Lewin noted that it was not enough to think of change in terms of simply reaching a new state, as this did not guarantee success. More recent evidence supports this argument and suggests that the majority of change projects fail to achieve what Hayes (2014) calls ‘stickability’ and sustain the change required. Buchanan and colleagues (2005) point out that this is because there appears to be no simple prescription for managing change, in order to achieve benefits. Or perhaps it is because practitioners are often so immersed in the everyday life of organizations, that it is often difficult for them to recognize the need for change.

Managers and leaders of organizations need to have an awareness of the need for change, and also the capability and capacity to be able to sustain change effectively. The aim of this book is to provide guidance to help business leaders, managers and students achieve this, through both theoretical and practical perspectives. We begin by briefly examining the literature on organizational change.

Literature on organizational change

There is a growing library of books and articles on organizational change, which appear, at first glance, to offer hope to anyone who wants to be successful with change initiatives. The literature contains contributions from several different academic disciplines, including psychology, sociology, business and management. It consists of evidence, examples and illustrations generated from a wide variety of organizations and from a diverse range of methodologies with varying degrees of rigour. The literature differs in format and tone, encompassing descriptive accounts of change, theoretical models for analysing change, prescriptive models that aim to guide the change process, typologies of different approaches to change in organizations, and empirical studies of the success or failure of various initiatives, programmes and tools. The literature can be broadly divided into populist and academic categories.

The populist view

There is a huge commercial market in popular management books on change, which range from hero-leader reflections and biographies to works by so-called gurus in the subject. Such books tend to be characterized by evangelical-style exhortations about change and accompanied by convincing stories and sound bites. They have been defined as ‘karaoke texts’, in a reference to their ‘I did it my way’ approach (Clegg and Palmer, 1996) and range from ‘how to lead change step by step’ through to quantum-change made easy. Such texts have snappy titles such as ‘Onward’, ‘Real People, Real Change’ and ‘Our Iceberg is Melting’. Some of them, such as ‘Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance’ by Louis Gerstner, are informative to read and a lot can be ...