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Summary course Changing Organizational Culture
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Week 1Lecture 1: introduction
Cultural change:
- Can culture be changed?
- Top-down, planned change programs
- Designing change interventions
- Criticizing planned changed approaches
- Alternative approach with focus on:
Micro-mechanisms in organizations, based on that you try to change behavior.
Aim of the A&S book
- Locating and drawing upon the experiences of living with organizational change efforts
among various groups of organizational members
- Investigate the organization of change work
- To get close to the practices of cultural change program
- To make change work more reflexive and productive
- Take experiences and views of those involved seriously
- Try to understand how change works out in the workaday live of managers and employees
Chapter 1 COC
Modern societal conditions are exceptional in terms of change: the stakes of dealing with change have
never been so high since the industrial revolution.
“Culture always defeats strategy”. (p.4)
Five issues that are important in understanding organizational change:
1) Time; history, short unit of analysis, a few hours
2) The need for change; including espoused or real motives to change.
3) Context and levels of analysis; an interest in organizational change may lead to an extension
of contexts to broad trends or macro- and business-level changes, for example changes in an
industry and how fashions affect an entire set of organizations at an aggregated level. Primary
interest in specific events and acts.
4) The content of change: these may be the means and/or outcomes of change projects.
5) theoretical perspective; there are a lot of them, in this book there is interpretative perspective,
in which the meaning-creating activities and the cultural background of such activities are
focused on.
The study in this book is focused on what is happening IN an organization, rather than WITH the
organization. Secondary attention to structural forces, fashions or institutional changes, and focus on
how people try to improve their organization in what they perceive to be some key respects.
Focus on culture, what those involved defined as culture, on meanings and symbols.
Latour (1986, 2005): idea of change and influence as translation, emphasizing how social institutions
and interactions are contingent upon how various actors pick up and reinterpret the elements
presumably linking people and social elements together.
Purpose of the book:
- how do managers, consultants and HRM people work with cultural change projects?
- What is happening in terms of processes?
- What are the outcomes in terms of responses and consequences?
- What can be learned about culture change projects and other forms of organizational changes?
,How do people connect themselves to and disconnect themselves from change objectives and change
work?
- Managing culture
- Organizational change project work
- The ambiguity
- Cultural meaning creation in organizations
- Paradoxes of change
- Identities and identification in organizations
Lecture 2: Planned change programs
H1+H2
Top-down change (A&S, 2016)
- Top-down change strategies dominates literature and practice
- Strategic and comprehensive change that is initiated with goals of comprehensive impact on
the organization and its performance capabilities
- Driven by the organization’s top management
- Success depends on support of middle-level and low-level workers
Strategic choices badly formulated/created in the daily process. It is not valuable for the ones who
have to change their way of working.
Internal triggers for change:
- Leadership
- Organizational culture
- New strategy
- Individual and organizational performance
External triggers for change:
- Changes in market
- Economic, environmental crisis
- Changes in external environment
Cultural locked ins; it is here but is difficult integrating it in the organization.
Planning approach
- Background in Human Relations; you need people that help you with integrating change.
- Open systems school: change projects are complex and unpredictable
- Sequential process: change is an N-step process
- Organization Development school: Lewin’s equilibrium model dominating the debate
Punctuated equilibrium model (Lewin, 1951)
Stage 1: unfreezing: creating motivation to change
- Disconfirmation to old situation/behavior
- Creation of change perspective
Stage 2: transforming: running the change process
- Restructuring organizational models, tasks creating new business process redesigns (BPR)
- Supporting cultural change by cognitive restructuring programs and communication of new
corporate values
Stage 3: re-freezing (there is always change, so re-freezing is not really possible anymore)
- Integrating new behavior in business systems
- Communicating new situation to relevant stakeholders
,Cultural change = strategic change (Bate, 1994)
Cultural development strategies (evolutionary)
- Strategies for order and continuity, strong culture
- Conforming strategies
- Maintenance and development of culture
- Cultural development rather than change
Transforming strategies (radical change)
- Strategies for change and discontinuity
- Change of culture
Mutual dependency of order and change
Integrated strategy
- Transformation and development strategy
- Culture is heterogeneous phenomena; sub-cultures with tension
- Culture is continuous in development
- Historical perspective; when and who founded it?
- Fit with development of organization
- Not prescriptive but descriptive; how to intervene and understand how to change it
- Not normative but exploring
- Creation of hybrid culture as an optimum for situation
- Fit between ambitions and results
Changing in time (Bate, 1994)
Different waves of change in organizations that we can observe.
First order change: the system itself does not change, but the behavior
Period of conflict: for example, new manager that takes new changes with him.
First order change: again.
The intensity increases and decreases with waves.
Thinking culturally
- Perceive organizational change processes from a cultural perspective
- Culture as a root metaphor
- Strategic change = cultural change
- Organization as open system
Strategies of cultural change (Paul Bate, 1994)
- Aggressive
- Conciliative
- Corrosive
- Indoctrinative
Aggressive approach
- Profile: cultural vandalism
- Rationality: large steps quick successes
- Application: transformation/frame breaking
Marks:
- Creation of insecurity
- Rewriting history; we already had success with this
- One man-show
- Ambition: establish strong corporate culture
, Conciliative approach
- Profile: cultural incrementalism
- Rationality: gradual steps, low profile
- Application: development and transformation
Marks:
- Open process
- Without conflict: self-regulating
- Patience
- Pluralist perspective
Corrosive approach
- Profile: politic culturalism
- Rationality: first actions, then direction; we will see what happens, what will come up
- Application: development / frame making
Marks:
- Secretly
- Informal systems, accessible for everybody
- Orientation on network
- Pluralist perspective; everything can happen on different levels, different power games can
emerge, new ideas can be raised
Indoctrinative approach
- Profile: cultural learning
- Rationality: empowerment and group learning
- Application: development and transformation
Marks:
- Planned, programmed
- Education = controlling
- Corporate message, core values
- Giving information
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