Graetz & Smith (2003): Managing organizational change: a philosophy perspective Flashcards
The traditional change agenda
Proposes that organizational change can and should be controlled, unfreezing, moving, and refreezing. Central to success is the leader.
Flawed in thinking that organizations are as controllable as a block of ice and ignoring the irrational human factor. These models imply that success is guaranteed.
The biological philosophy
Population ecologists took a biological view of industrial behavior. They suggested that change comes about as a consequence of Darwinian-like natural selection, where industries gradually evolve to match the constraints of their environmental context.
Secondly, it compares the ongoing stages of progress and change in organizations to organic processes of growth and reproduction. The life cycle philosophy implicitly assumes that change is imminent and progressive. Referencing to its life cycle. Birth, growth, maturity, decline and death are all-natural parts of an organization’s development.
Change from a biological perspective must be viewed as dynamic. The evolutionary and life cycle sub-philosophies reflect a slow and incremental pace of change, moderately affected by the environment, moderately controllable, and tending toward certainty.
The Rational Philosophy (also referred to as Strategic)
It refers to an organization’s composition, competencies and state over time, and its environmental context. Change occurs simply because senior managers and other change agents deem it necessary. The process for change is rational and linear, like in evolutionary and life cycle approaches, but with managers as the pivotal instigators of change.
Strategic choice theorists belong to the rational philosophy and maintain that leaders and managers have ultimate control of their organizations. Events outside the organization are exogenous. Successful change is firmly in the hands of managers: change is internally directed, controlled and certain.
The Institutional Philosophy
It is less the strategy in place or even the competition for scarce resources that stimulates organizational change, but rather the pressures in the wider institutional context. These might come in the form of new regulatory, financial or legal conditions.
Change is largely a function of a shifting industrial landscape. The implication is that successful organizations are successful because their set-up neatly accommodates the industrial pressures to which they are obligated to respond.
Institutional theory is valuable in explaining the way in which social, economic and legal pressures influence organizational structures and practices, and how an organization’s ability to adapt to these play a part in determining organizational survival and prosperity.
It downplays internal forces and the impact that organizational actors can have on their own predicament. The stimulus for change is external, control is mostly undirected, and certainty is moderate.
The Resource Philosophy
Any given organization does not possess all the resources it needs in a competitive environment. Acquisition of these resources is therefore the critical activity for both survival and prosperity. Thus, successful organizations over time are the ones which are the best at acquiring, developing and deploying scarce resources and skills. Understanding that a dependence on resources increases uncertainty for organizations, is particularly useful to change attempts because it encourages an awareness of critical threats and obstacles to performance.
The Contingency Philosophy
Based on the proposition that organizational performance is a consequence of the fit between two or more factors, such as an organization’s environment, use of technology, strategy, structure, systems, style or culture. However, variables such as inertia, inflexibility, resource immobility and industry pressure make the fit between factors difficult to predict.
The Psychological Philosophy
Based on the assumption that the most important dimension of change is found in personal and individual experience. It is concerned with the human side of change and has clear links with human relations, human development and organizational development approaches, which emerged in response to the overly mechanistic methods of scientific management.
The Political Philosophy
explains change as the result of clashing ideology or belief systems. Conflict is seen as not only an inherent attribute of human interaction, but also as the most important one driving change. This conflict approach means that change processes inevitably revolve around activities such as bargaining, consciousness-raising, persuasion, influence and power, and social movements. The strength of the political philosophy is that it reveals the importance of clashing ideological imperatives in organizations, as well as the inescapable axiom that without power change is futile.
The Cultural Philosophy
Change is normal in that it is a response to changes in the human environment. The difficulty is that this process is natural, leading to the construction of firm ways of thinking about how things should be done. As a result, imposing change means fighting entrenched sets of values and beliefs shared by organizational members. Cultural perspective is exclusively concerned with collective experiences of change, and the shared values that guide them.
The Systems Philosophy
Looks beyond simplistic causal views of management and the constituent parts of organizations. It developed with the intention of acknowledging the importance of holistic analysis rather than focusing on compartments of organizations. Thus, organizations were seen as the sum of their parts rather than as a collection of reduced units.
The key to change for systems theorists is to first appreciate that any imposed change has numerous and sometimes multiplied effects across an organization, and consequently, in order for change management to be successful, it must be introduced across the range of organizational units and sub-systems. However, this philosophy ignores the powerful and highly significant changes occurring outside an organization, such as those in technology, employment and society.
The Postmodern Philosophy
Best described as one which is comfortable with ephemerality, fragmentation, discontinuity and chaos, but also seeks to take action rationally toward ongoing improvement.
The postmodern philosophy views reality as multiplicitous, fragmented and contradictory. The rational philosophy approach to change will be restricted in its success because no one unified view of an organization’s future reality can be communicated. Change is seen as a product of ‘discourse’ within organizations and its application is the subject of significant debate and contention.
