COM Summary of Changing Organizational Culture: Cultural Change Work in Progress by Mats Alvesson and Steve Sveningsson
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Course
S_COC
Institution
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU)
Complete summary of the book 'Changing Organizational Culture: Cultural Change Work in Progress' by Mats Alvesson and Steve Sveningsson, which is mandatory reading for the COM/BCO course changing organizational culture. This summary helped me achieve a grade 8,0 in the final exam.
Book Summary
(mandatory reading for Changing Organizational Culture COM/BCO)
Changing Organizational Culture: Cultural Change Work Progress
by Mats Alvesson and Steve Sveningsson (2015)
,Perspectives on Organizational and Cultural Change
Chapter 1: Introduction
- Change efforts often fail due to neglect of aspects of organizational culture
- Understanding change as a process
- Investigate the organization of change work
- Make change work more reflexive and productive
- Aim is to take experiences and views of those involved seriously
Chapter 2: Organizational Change
- There has been an increase in three-letter-acronym improvement programmes/
models of organizational culture change
- Studies have shown that the majority of them have high failure rates
- Forces of organizational change: market, political cultural, technological, economic,
demographic
- The same organizational pressures may not lead to the same results in different
companies because people make sese of them based on personal interests,
educational background etc.
- Serial Change Companies: organizations adopting whatever change programme they
perceive as popular by business schools and consultants
Planning Approach
- Accomplishing managerially planned organizational change with change
programmes
- Two approaches to planned orgnizational change
- Background Human Relations School: Resistance by employees due to technological
changes, Hawthorne studies said social dimension wasn’t taken into account
enough, which is the real reason behind resistance and can be solved by managers
listening to and appreciating experience and knowledge of employees in change
projects; was further elaborated by Lewin in Group Dynamics School
1) Group Dynamics School and Organizational Development OD
- Group Dynamics School targets change at the group level because most
people are engaged in small working groups at work
- Lewin proposed 3-step model to target group norms and values in change
projects
➔ Unfreezing: Destabalizing the status quo of group norms and values;
convincing change agents of the change’s neccessity
➔ Change: Moving the organization to a new and acceptable state
➔ Refreezing: Stabilizing the new state and preventing it from regressing
into previous behaviour
Lewin Model (1951) - Punctuated equilibrium Model to target group norms and values in
change projects
Stage 1: Unfreezing - Creating Innovation to change
- Dis-conformation to old situation/behaviour
- 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: Refreezing - Stabilizing the new Situation
- Integrating new behaviour in business systems
- Communicating new situation to relevant stakeholders
He pointed to integrated components necessary in understanding all the elements of a
change process
- Intentifying countervailing forces as part of force field analysis
- Understanding the characteristics necessary to influence movement
- Understanding resistance as a n element of habits within groups
- Role of group decision-making as underpinned by personal and group
motivations
- Usefulness of Action research
- Central idea is that through knowledge commitment and learning resistance
can be prevented
- Organizational Development (OD) movement: Initiative for change is taken by
top management, change efforts are implemented at higher levels first and
lower levels are then progressively involved; long-term rather than quick fix
- Values underpinning OD: culture of collaboration, continuous learning, open
communication, empowering employees to act, facilitating ownership of
change process and outcomes
2) Open Systems School
- Emphasizes the importance of having an organizational-wide view of
organizational change and view it in its entirety not just groups
- Organization consists of interconnected sub-systems
- Argues that change process should be systemic and that an alignment
betweeen the softer elements (people, leaders, value) and the harder
elements (technology, structure and strategy) is needed
- In most Open Systems models culture is viewed as one variable of many that
needs to be manegerially aligned with the others to implement organizational
change effectively
Critique of Planning Approach
- Assumes that it is possible to control change processes and that processes
and outcomes are predictable
- Says little about HOW change changes emerge in organizations and how
people interpret change efforts and relate to them
- The empirical material used is often of anecdotal character and disregards
the variety of people invovled in the change process
- Real life complexities connected to change processes are reduced to banal
recommendations that don’t help understand the complexities and depth of
change processes
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