Managing Change: 7 Edition

Managing Change
7th edition
Chapter 5
Alternative paradigms: Japanese
management, organisational
learning and the need for
sustainability
Copyright © 2017, 2015, 2010 Pearson Education, Inc. All Rights Reserved
The Japanese approach (1 of 9)
Distinct features
• Personnel policies (soft)
• Business practices and work systems (hard).
Effectiveness comes from the ability to combine
soft and hard practices.
Personnel policies (soft)
• Lifetime employment
• Internal labour markets
• Seniority-based promotion and reward systems
• Teamwork and bonding
• Enterprise(single-company) unions
• Training and education
• Company welfarism.
Designed to promote:
• Loyalty and gratitude
• Commitment
• Sense of security
• Hard work and improvement
• Cooperation not conflict
• Self-development.
Business practices and work systems (hard)
Long-term planning
– 15 years
– Market growth
– Low dividends
– Low profits.
Decision-Making
The Ringi System

• New Proposals Are Extensively Debated
• Sent To All Concerned in Ascending Order
• Full Agreement Needed to Proceed
The Result:
• Slow Decision-Making
• Fast Execution
• Right First Time
Timeliness
• Fast product development
• JIT
• Right first time.
Quality
• Total quality approach
• Continuous improvement.
Change
• Strategic intent
• Ringi decision-making
• Kaizen – continuous improvement
Summary
• Values and promotes loyalty
• Slow promotion
• Seniority principle
• Lifetime employment
• Paternalistic and deferential
• Slow, collective decision-making.
Change is continuous, incremental, bottom-up but
within an overall company vision.
Criticisms
• Two-tier labour markets
• Lifetime employment = slavery
• Teamwork = coercive pressure
• Enterprise unions = exploitation
• Cannot accommodate globalisation and
workforce diversity
• Threatened by economic shocks.
What is Organisational learning?
Organisational learning (1 of 2)
Summary
• Survival depends on the organisational learning
(adapting) at the same rate or faster than the
environment changes.
• Learning must become a collective and not just an
individual process.
• There must be a fundamental shift towards systems
(or triple-loop) thinking by an organisation’s members.
• This gives an organisation the ability to adapt to,
influence and even create its environment.
Change comes from learning and learning comes
from change.
Organisational learning (2 of 2)
Criticisms
• No agreed definition
• Scarcity of rigorous empirical evidence
• Organisations do not learn – people learn
• It requires the creation of organisational diversity
and consensus at the same time.
Sustainability: a paradigm changer?
• A growing acceptance of the need for environmental
sustainability
• Confirmed by the Paris 2015 UN Climate Change
Conference
• Sustainability has now become a major issue for
governments
• It poses major challenges for organisations.
Definitions of Sustainability (1 of 2)
‘…development that meets the needs of the
present without compromising the ability of future
generations to meet their own needs. It contains
within it… the concept of “needs”, in particular the
essential needs of the world’s poor, to which
overriding priority should be given’.
(The Brundtland Report, 1987: 41)
Definitions of Sustainability (2 of 2)
Sustainability involves the integration of a ‘…highly

interconnected set of seemingly incompatible
social, ecological, and economic systems’.
(Valente, 2012: 585)
Sustainability Concerns (1 of 2)
‘Humanity currently needs the regenerative
capacity of 1.5 Earths to provide the ecological
goods and services we use each year…. The sum
of all human demands no longer fits within what
nature can renew. The consequences are
diminished resource stocks and waste
accumulating faster than it can be absorbed or
recycled, such as with the growing carbon
concentration in the atmosphere’.
(WWF, 2014)
Sustainability Concerns (2 of 2)
‘Sustainability… encompasses three levels: the
individual, the organizational and the societal.
Sustainability at one level cannot be built on the
exploitation of the others. These levels are intimately
related to the organization’s key stakeholders:
personnel, customers, owners and society. An
organization cannot be sustainable by prioritizing the
goals and needs of some stakeholders at the expense
of others… Thus sustainability has a value basis in the
due considerations and balancing of different
stakeholders’ legitimate needs and goals’.
(Docherty et al, 2002: 12)
Sustainability problems will be resolved:
‘The only question is whether they will become
resolved in pleasant ways of our choice, or in the
unpleasant ways not of our choice, such as
warfare, genocide, starvation, disease epidemics,
and the collapse of societies’.
(Diamond, 2005: 499)
Sustainability and organisations
‘There is a widespread view that governments must
solve environmental problems. However, the major
multinationals outstrip many of the world’s national
economies in terms of wealth and power, and their
global coverage allows them to escape the
requirements of particular governments seeking to
place severe environmental restrictions on them. They
can simply move their operations across national
borders. The world’s multinationals are in fact more
powerful than most national governments’.
(Dunphy and Griffiths, 1998: 183)
Sustainability v Neoliberal Economics
(1 of 2)
• Organisations need to balance People, Planet and
Profits – the Triple Bottom Line
• Neoliberalism prioritises profits above everything
else – this is incompatible with sustainability.
• Sustainability requires a curtailing of the primacy of
the profit motive and the independence of individual
organisations.
• Collaboration across a wide range of public and
private bodies will be required if sustainability is to
be achieved.
Sustainability v Neoliberal Economics
(2 of 2)
• This raises questions about the appropriateness of
existing approaches to organisational effectiveness,
especially those like Culture-Excellence, which are
closely aligned to neoliberal principles.

Managing Change: 7 Edition

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Managing Change: 7 Edition

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Managing Change

The Ringi System

Sustainability involves the integration of a ‘…highly

You might also like