Session 5

Comprehensive organizational
change approaches
Comprehensive organizational change
approaches
 There are three specific but comprehensive
approaches to organizational change.

 The first is organizational development (OD), which

is an approach with strong behavioral and people
orientation.

 The second is the more engineering based

approach called reengineering.

 The final is organizational learning.

The organizational Development (OD)
approach to change
 The essence of OD approach to change is its
emphasis on planned, strategic, long-range efforts
focusing on people and their interrelationships in
organizations.

 Better explanation:

 Organizational development (OD) approach to

organizational change that has strong behavioral
and people orientation, emphasizing planned,
strategic, long range efforts focusing on people and
their interrelationships in organization.
The OD approaches to change to
change
 Grew out of behavioral science research as far back
as 1930s and 1940s.

 Aimed at improving the communications and quality of

interaction among individuals in groups.

 Researchers put together groups of individuals in sessions

away from the workplace in what were termed basic skills
training groups, or, as they came to be called for short, T-
groups.

 T-groups: group of individuals participating in

organizational development sessions away from the
workplace; also called basic skill training groups.
The OD approach to change
 The T-group orientation over time broadened into focus on
interpersonal relationships throughout the larger organization,
and hence, the attention to organizational, not just group,
development.

Values and Assumptions

 The early formulation of what eventually evolved in the OD

approach place particular importance on certain values and
assumptions, and they have remained at the heart of this
approach to change to this day.

 First is the assumption that “people are the cornerstone of

success in any organizational endeavor.

 A second value or assumption is that most people desire

opportunities for personal growth and enhancement of their
capabilities.
The OD approach to change
 Another basic value belief about people that
underlies this approach to change is that their
emotions are as important as their rational thoughts
and that, therefore, the open expression of these
emotions can be critical in facilitating real change.

 Fundamental assumption about organizations in the

OD approach is that they are systems composed of
interdependent parts and thus …

 A change in any one part can have a major effects on other

parts.
The OD approach to change
 Another assumption is that the way
organizations are designed and structured
will influence the interpersonal relationship
among people in them.

 In other words, the behavior of people in

organizational settings flows not just from their
intrinsic nature but also from conditions they
encounter in these contexts – and these
conditions can be changed.
Basic approach to the process of
change
Lewin’s basic OD approach to organizational change
involves three seemingly simple steps:

 Unfreezing
 Changing
 Refreezing

 These steps are easy to state and remember, but

they are not especially easy to put into practice.
Basic approach to the process of
change
 Unfreezing emphasized the need to get people to examine critically
and openly their current attitudes or behavior pattern.

 In effect and using a force filed analysis, the unfreezing process

is designed to decrease the restraining force of existing
viewpoints and customary ways of doing things.

 In one sense we can think of the unfreezing stage as an effort to

lower resistance to change rather than focusing on specific
resources of resistance.

 Therefore, in an OD approach to change, the initial challenge is

to unfreeze existing behavior patterns by getting people not to
take them for granted but to question them and look at their
effects.
 For e.g when a certain mine decided to use OD techniques to
reduce its accident rate, the first necessary step was to
change existing attitudes about safety.
Basic approach to the process of change
 This was accomplish by changing the organizational climate
concerning safety.

 Managers began to emphasized safety as a goal and they

allocated funds to improve specific hazardous conditions.

 They also made a point to emphasized that every member of the

company was responsible for safety.

 Employees are encouraged to meet and discussed safety issues

and come up with ways of doing tasks that would help them by
making their work safer.

 All these steps helped to convince the miners that management

was serious about improving safety conditions and it primed them
to accept and implement required procedural changes.

 Results of the OD intervention demonstrated a 50 percent

reduction in on-the-job injuries.
Basic approach to the process of change
 In the traditional OD approach, both the first and
second steps, unfreezing and changing, involve the
use of change agents.

 Change agents individuals who are responsible for

implementing change efforts; they can be either internal
and external to the organization.

 That is, either from inside the organization, often the human
resources department or they can be from the outside.

 These groups of professional can be a consultant, someone with

experience, expertise in helping groups see the need for change
and in making change,
Basic approach to the process of change
 The changes themselves are achieved by the
use of one or more interventions, that is, “set
of structured activities,” or action steps,
designed to improve the organization.

 Some of these interventions, such as fact

finding, begin in the unfreezing stage, and
others, such as team building and
coaching/counseling, take place in the
changing stage.
Basic approach to the process of
change
 The priority in the second change stage is exploring

new form of behavior and relationships.

 Particularly important at this point is an emphasize

on behavioral processes, such as leader-group
relations, decision making, inter-group cooperation
and the like.

 This behavioral process orientation is a key

distinguishing feature of the OD approach to
organizational change.
Basic approach to the process of
 Merely engaging in new and different ways of
change
behaving, relating and interacting is not enough for
changes to have lasting effects.

 This is why Lewin included the third stage,

refreezing (transforming a new behavior pattern into the norm
through reinforcement and support mechanism)

 The intent of this third stage was to make sure that the
changes “stick” and that behavior and relationship don’t
easily return to their former –less – effective – states.

 This means that the new patterns must become, in effect,

new habits that are not easily dislodged by a tendency to
return to old routines.
Basic approach to the process of
change
 Since the time of Lewin’s formulation of this three-stage change
process many years ago, the goal of refreezing has been
converted into the objective of organizational renewal.

 Organization renewal: a concept of organizational change that

proposes a goal of flexibility and capability for continual change.

 This new focus takes into account the fact that in contemporary,
fast-changing, competitive world, new habits and patterns rapidly
become old and outdated themselves and may need to be
replaced after relatively short periods of time.

 Therefore, the emphasis has shifted from refreezing to

developing a capacity for renewal, a goal that incorporates
flexibility and the ability to change more or less continually.
Basic approach to the process of change
 The OD legacy survives in various forms in
many organizations today but other, newer
comprehensive approaches to change has
attracted increasing attention from many
managers in the last decade or so.

 Two of these are:

 Reengineering

 Organizational learning
Reengineering
 Business process reengineering is a radical redesign of business
processes to achieve (intended) dramatic improvements.

 Sometimes also known as restructuring.

 Information technology, of course, often plays a central role in such

reengineering efforts.

 But human and managerial issues related to reengineering are also

extremely crucial to its success in organizations.

 Breadth of reengineering means change in terms of redesign of a set of

processes across a complete business unit rather than a change in a single,
limited process.

 and depth of reengineering means a change in a related set core

organizational elements such as roles and responsibilities, structure,
incentives, shared values and the like, rather than any one or two of these
elements.
Reengineering
 Adequate breadth and depth by themselves are not enough for
reengineering to succeed.

 A major commitment must come from the top of the organization,

that is, from key executives (of the total organization or of its
major units) who can supply the necessary resources to
implement these activities and who can take the time to
demonstrate personal involvement in the entire redesign
process.

 Like any comprehensive change approach, for reengineering to

be successful requires enormous energy, planning, coordinated
effort, persistence, and attention to detail.

 Without substantial backing, it is likely to fail.

Organizational learning (OL)
 OL has become a major focus in approaches to organizational
change and renewal.

 OL: exhibited by an organization that is skilled at creating,

acquiring and transferring knowledge and at modifying its
behavior to reflect new knowledge and insights.

 The central idea is that organizations that emphasize this

perspective are:

 Attempting to change and improve continuously, not just

periodically.

 Basing these improvements on a foundation of new knowledge

they have learned.
Organizational Learning
 Several factors have been shown to facilitate
learning by organizations:

 Existing and well-developed central, core

competencies of current personnel.

 An organization culture that supports continuous

improvement.

 The availability of organizational capabilities (e.g.

managerial expertise) to be able to implement the
necessary changes.
Organization Learning
 Clearly, managers and organizations cannot simply
decide or declare, that learning should take place.

 The elements listed above need to be in place as a

starting point if organizational learning is going to
lead to any real benefits.

 Then, a number of activities need to take place to

implement fully an ongoing learning process in
organizations.

 Five of the major important are explained here:

Organization Learning
1. Systematic, Organized and Consistent
Approach to Problem Solving

 Similar to the emphasis on scientific methods in

the TQM approach, a learning process in
organizations requires the continual collection of
factual data, rather than reliance on assumptions
or guess-work, to aid problem solving and
decision making.
Organization Learning
2. Experimentation to Obtain New Knowledge

 Learning organizations do not simply solve problem.

 They experiment with new methods and procedures

to expand their knowledge and gain fresh insights.

 They engage in a steady series of small

experiments to keep acquiring new knowledge
consistently and to help employees become
accustomed to change.
Organization Learning
3. Drawing Lessons from Past Experiences

 Enterprises with strong learning cultures pay

particular attention to lessons from both past
failures as well as past successes.

 It’s not having the experience is important, it’s

what you have learned from the experience
that is important.
Organization Learning
4. Learning from the Best Practice and Ideas of Others

 Organization and their managers that are strongly

committed to learning are also humble in a certain
respect.

 They do not assume they already know how to do

everything better than other organizations, whether they
are competitors, enterprises outside their own industry or
sphere of operations, or customers.

 They consistently spend resources to scan their

environment to gain information and knowledge from a
variety of external sources.
 One common form of this is benchmarking, where the
best practices of competitors are identified, analyzed
and compared against one’s own practice.
Organization Learning
 Benchmarking: identification, analysis and comparison of
the best practices of competitors against an
organization’s own practices.

5. Transferring and Sharing Knowledge

 Another core activity of an organizational learning

approach is to make sure that the new knowledge that is
gained is actually disseminated widely throughout
relevant units of the organization.

 This requires that managers be alert to both the need for

information sharing as well as ways to do it.

 Would include such activities as distributing reports,

developing demonstration projects, initiating training and
education programs and rotating or transferring those
with the knowledge .
Organization learning
 As an approach to change, an organizational learning
perspective has much to offer.

 It places the emphasis on constant attention to the possible need

for changes, and it embodies the goal of renewal, of pushing
organization or units within them to continue to reinvent
themselves in one way or another through the purposeful and
persistent acquisition of new knowledge.

 Since environments never stay the same, successful

organizations can never stay the same.

 One of the best ways both to keep up with changing

environments and to keep ahead of them is for managers to
focus intently on instilling a learning culture in their areas of
responsibility.
End of lecture