Evidence-Based Programming - Organizational Development

The Advocacy Foundation Professional Development Series

1 Peter 5:1-5

Evidence-Based Programming Continuing Professional Development Part II Organizational Development

† “Helping Individuals, Organizations & Communities Achieve Their Full Potential” John C Johnson III

Vol. V

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The Advocacy Foundation, Inc. Helping Individuals, Organizations & Communities Achieve Their Full Potential

Professional Development Series

Evidence-Based Programming

Organizational Development

“Helping Individuals, Organizations & Communities Achieve Their Full Potential 1735 Market Street, Suite 3750 Philadelphia, PA 19102

| 100 Edgewood Avenue, Suite 1690 Atlanta, GA 30303

John C Johnson III Founder & CEO

(878) 222-0450 Voice | Fax | SMS www.TheAdvocacyFoundation.org

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Biblical Authority ______ 1 Peter 5:1-5 (...)

To the Elders and the Flock

5 To the elders among you, I appeal as a fellow elder and a witness of Christ‘s sufferings who also will share in the glory to be revealed: 2 Be shepherds of God‘s flock that is under your care, watching over them—not because you must, but because you are willing, as God wants you to be; not pursuing dishonest gain, but eager to serve; 3 not lording it over those entrusted to you, but being examples to the flock. 4 And when the Chief Shepherd appears, you will receive the crown of glory that will never fade away.

5

In the same way, you who are younger, submit yourselves to your elders. All of you, clothe yourselves with humility toward one another, because, ―God opposes the proud but shows favor to the humble.‖

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Table of Contents Evidence-Based Programming Organizational Development

Biblical Authority I.

Introduction

II.

Historical Perspectives & Core Values

III.

Improving Organizational Performance

IV.

Executive Development

V.

Leadership Development

VI.

Group Dynamics

VII. Managing Organizational Change VIII. Organizational Culture, Diagnostics & ReEngineering IX.

Succession Planning

X.

Ambidextrous Organizations

XI.

Communities of Innovation

XII. References Attachments A: What Is Organizational Development B: Organizational Development: Problems & Proposals

Copyright Š 2015 The Advocacy Foundation, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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Introduction Organization Development (OD) is a deliberately planned, organization-wide effort to increase an organization's effectiveness and/or efficiency and/or to enable the organization to achieve its strategic goals.

OD theorists and practitioners define it in various ways.

Its multiplicity of definition reflects the complexity of the discipline and is responsible for its lack of understanding. For example, Vasudevan has referred to OD being about promoting organizational readiness to meet change,[citation needed] and it has been said that OD is a systemic learning and development strategy intended to change the basics of beliefs, attitudes and relevance of values, and structure of the current organization to better absorb disruptive technologies, shrinking or exploding market opportunities and ensuing challenges and chaos. It is worth understanding what OD is not. It is not training, personal development, team development or team building, human resource development (HRD), learning and development (L&D) or a part of HR although it is often mistakenly understood as some or all of these. OD interventions are about change so involve people - but OD also develops processes, systems and structures. The primary purpose of OD is to develop the organization, not to train or develop the staff.

An Ongoing Process Organization development is an ongoing, systematic process of implementing effective organizational change. OD is known as both a field of science focused on understanding and managing organizational change and as a field of scientific study and inquiry. It is interdisciplinary in nature and draws on sociology, psychology, particularly industrial and organizational psychology, and theories of motivation, learning, and personality. Although behavioral science has provided the basic foundation for the study and practice of OD, new and emerging fields of study have made their presence felt. Experts in systems thinking and organizational learning, structure of intuition in decision making, and coaching (to name a few) whose perspective is not steeped in just the behavioral sciences, but a much more multidisciplinary and inter-disciplinary approach, have emerged as OD catalysts or tools.

Organization development is a growing field that is responsive to many new approaches.

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Historical Perspectives & Core Values Kurt Lewin (1898–1947) is widely recognized as the founding father of OD, although he died before the concept became current in the mid-1950s. From Lewin came the ideas of group dynamics and action research which underpin the basic OD process as well as providing its collaborative consultant/client ethos. Institutionally, Lewin founded the "Research Center for Group Dynamics" (RCGD) at MIT, which moved to Michigan after his death. RCGD colleagues were among those who founded the National Training Laboratories (NTL), from which the Tgroups and group-based OD emerged.

Kurt Lewin played a key role in the evolution of organization development as it is known today.

As early as World War II, Lewin experimented with a collaborative change process (involving himself as consultant and a client group) based on a three-step process of planning, taking action, and measuring results. This was the forerunner of action research, an important element of OD, which will be discussed later. Lewin then participated in the beginnings of laboratory training, or T-groups, and, after his death in 1947, his close associates helped to develop survey-research methods at the University of Michigan. These procedures became important parts of OD as developments in this field continued at the National Training Laboratories and in growing numbers of universities and private consulting firms across the country. Two of the leading universities offering doctoral level degrees in OD are Benedictine University and the Fielding Graduate University.

Douglas McGregor and Richard Beckhard while "consulting together at General Mills in the 1950s, the two coined the term organization development (OD) to describe an innovative bottoms-up change effort that fit no traditional consulting categories" (Weisbord, 1987, p. 112).

The failure of off-site laboratory training to live up to its early promise was one of the important forces stimulating the development of OD. Laboratory training is learning from a person's "here and now" experience as a member of an ongoing training group. Such groups usually meet without a specific agenda. Their purpose is for the members to learn about themselves from their spontaneous "here and now" responses to an ambiguous hypothetical situation. Problems of leadership, structure, status, communication, and self-serving behavior typically arise in such a group. The members have an opportunity to learn something about themselves and to practice such skills as listening, observing others, and functioning as effective group members.

As formerly practiced (and occasionally still practiced for special purposes), laboratory training was conducted in "stranger groups," or groups composed of individuals from different organizations, situations, and backgrounds. A major difficulty developed, however, in transferring knowledge gained from these "stranger labs" to the actual situation "back home".

This required a transfer between two different cultures, the relatively safe and protected environment of the T-group (or training group) and the give-and-take of the organizational environment with its traditional values. This led the early pioneers in this type of learning to begin to apply it to "family groups" — that is, groups located within an organization. From this shift in the locale of the training site and the realization that culture was an important factor in

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influencing group members (along with some other developments in the behavioral sciences) emerged the concept of organization development.

Core Values Underlying Organization Development are humanistic values. Margulies and Raia (1972) articulated the humanistic values of OD as follows: 1. Providing opportunities for people to function as human beings rather than as resources in the productive process.

2. Providing opportunities for each organization member, as well as for the organization itself, to develop to their full potential.

3. Seeking to increase the effectiveness of the organization in terms of all of its goals.

4. Attempting to create an environment in which it is possible to find exciting and challenging work.

5. Providing opportunities for people in organizations to influence the way in which they relate to work, the organization, and the environment.

6. Treating each human being as a person with a complex set of needs, all of which are important to their work and their life.

Differentiating OD from other change efforts such as- 1. Operation management 2. Training and Development 3. Technological innovations....etc.

Objectives of OD The objectives of OD are: 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

To increase the level of inter-personal trust among employees.

To increase employees' level of satisfaction and commitment.

To confront problems instead of neglecting them.

To effectively manage conflict.

To increase cooperation and collaboration among the employees.

To increase the organization's problem solving.

To put in place processes that will help improve the ongoing operation of the organization on a continuous basis.

As objectives of organizational development are framed keeping in view specific situations, they vary from one situation to another. In other words, these programs are tailored to meet the requirements of a particular situation. But broadly speaking, all organizational development programs try to achieve the following objectives: 1. Making individuals in the organization aware of the vision of the organization.

Organizational development helps in making employees align with the vision of the organization.

2. Encouraging employees to solve problems instead of avoiding them.

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3. Strengthening inter-personnel trust, cooperation, and communication for the successful achievement of organizational goals.

4. Encouraging every individual to participate in the process of planning, thus making them feel responsible for the implementation of the plan.

5. Creating a work atmosphere in which employees are encouraged to work and participate enthusiastically.

6. Replacing formal lines of authority with personal knowledge and skill.

7. Creating an environment of trust so that employees willingly accept change.

According to organizational development thinking, organization development provides managers with a vehicle for introducing change systematically by applying a broad selection of management techniques. This, in turn, leads to greater personal, group, and organizational effectiveness.

Change Agent A change agent in the sense used here is not a technical expert skilled in such functional areas as accounting, production, or finance. The change agent is a behavioral scientist who knows how to get people in an organization involved in solving their own problems. A change agent's main strength is a comprehensive knowledge of human behavior, supported by a number of intervention techniques (to be discussed later). The change agent can be either external or internal to the organization. An internal change agent is usually a staff person who has expertise in the behavioral sciences and in the intervention technology of OD. Beckhard reports several cases in which line people have been trained in OD and have returned to their organizations to engage in successful change assignments. In the natural evolution of change mechanisms in organizations, this would seem to approach the ideal arrangement.

Qualified change agents can be found on some university faculties, or they may be private consultants associated with such organizations as the National Training Laboratories Institute for Applied Behavioral Science (Washington, D.C.) University Associates (San Diego, California), the Human Systems Intervention graduate program in the Department of Applied Human Sciences (Concordia University, Montreal, Canada), Navitus (Pvt) Ltd (Pakistan), MaxFoster Global and similar organizations.

The change agent may be a staff or line member of the organization who is schooled in OD theory and technique. In such a case, the "contractual relationship" is an in-house agreement that should probably be explicit with respect to all of the conditions involved except the fee.

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Sponsoring Organization The initiative for OD programs often comes from an organization that has a problem or anticipates facing a problem. This means that top management or someone authorized by top management is aware that a problem exists and has decided to seek help in solving it. There is a direct analogy here to the practice of psychotherapy: The client or patient must actively seek help in finding a solution to his problems. This indicates a willingness on the part of the client organization to accept help and assures the organization that management is actively concerned.

Applied Behavioral Science One of the outstanding characteristics of OD that distinguishes it from most other improvement programs is that it is based on a "helping relationship." Some believe that the change agent is not a physician to the organization's ills; that s/he does not examine the "patient," make a diagnosis, and write a prescription. Nor does she try to teach organizational members a new inventory of knowledge which they then transfer to the job situation. Using theory and methods drawn from such behavioral sciences as industrial/organizational psychology, industrial sociology, communication, cultural anthropology, administrative theory, organizational behavior, economics, and political science, the change agent's main function is to help the organization define and solve its own problems. The basic method used is known as action research. This approach, which is described in detail later, consists of a preliminary diagnosis, collecting data, feedback of the data to the client, data exploration by the client group, action planning based on the data, and taking action.

Systems Context The Holistic and Futuristic View of Organization OD deals with a total system — the organization as a whole, including its relevant environment — or with a subsystem or systems — departments or work groups — in the context of the total system. Parts of systems — for example, individuals, cliques, structures, norms, values, and products — are not considered in isolation; the principle of interdependency — that change in one part of a system affects the other parts — is fully recognized. Thus, OD interventions focus on the total culture and cultural processes of organizations. The focus is also on groups, since the relevant behavior of individuals in organizations and groups is generally a product of the influences of groups rather than of personalities.

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Improving Organizational Performance The objective of OD is to improve the organization's capacity to handle its internal and external functioning and relationships. This includes improved interpersonal and group processes, more effective communication, enhanced ability to cope with organizational problems of all kinds. It also involves more effective decision processes, more appropriate leadership styles, improved skill in dealing with destructive conflict, as well as developing improved levels of trust and cooperation among organizational members. These objectives stem from a value system based on an optimistic view of the nature of man — that man in a supportive environment is capable of achieving higher levels of development and accomplishment. Essential to organization development and effectiveness is the scientific method — inquiry, a rigorous search for causes, experimental testing of hypotheses, and review of results.

Self-managing work groups allows the members of a work team to manage, control, and monitor all facets of their work, from recruiting, hiring, and new employees to deciding when to take rest breaks. An early analysis of the first-selfmanaging work groups yielded the following behavioral characteristics (Hackman, 1986): 

  

Employees assume personal responsibility and accountability for outcomes of their work.  Employees monitor their own performance and seek feedback on how well they are accomplishing their goals.

Employees manage their performance and take corrective action when necessary to improve their and the performance of other group members.

Employees seek guidance, assistance, and resources from the organization when they do not have what they need to do the job.

Employees help members of their work group and employees in other groups to improve job performance and raise productivity for the organization as a whole.

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Organizational Self-Renewal The ultimate aim of OD practitioners is to "work themselves out of a job" by leaving the client organization with a set of tools, behaviors, attitudes, and an action plan with which to monitor its own state of health and to take corrective steps toward its own renewal and development. This is consistent with the systems concept of feedback as a regulatory and corrective mechanism.

Understanding Organizations Weisbord presents a six-box model for understanding organizations: 1. Purposes: The organization members are clear about the organization's mission and purpose and goal agreements, whether people support the organization's purpose.

2. Structure: How is the organization's work divided up? The question is whether there is an adequate fit between the purpose and the internal structure.

3. Relationship: Between individuals, between units or departments that perform different tasks, and between the people and requirements of their jobs.

4. Rewards: The consultant should diagnose the similarities between what the organization formally rewarded or punished members for.

5. Leadership: Is to watch for blips among the other boxes and maintain balance among them.

6. Helpful mechanism: Is a helpful organization that must attend to in order to survive which as planning, control, budgeting, and other information systems that help organization member accomplish.

Modern Development In recent years, serious questioning has emerged about the relevance of OD to managing change in modern organizations. The need for "reinventing" the field has become a topic that even some of its "founding fathers" are discussing critically.

With this call for reinvention and change, scholars have begun to examine organization development from an emotion-based standpoint. For example, deKlerk (2007) writes about how emotional trauma can negatively affect performance. Due to downsizing, outsourcing, mergers, restructuring, continual changes, invasions of privacy, harassment, and abuses of power, many employees experience the emotions of aggression, anxiety, apprehension, cynicism, and fear, which can lead to performance decreases. deKlerk (2007) suggests that in order to heal the trauma and increase performance, O.D. practitioners must acknowledge the existence of the trauma, provide a safe place for employees to discuss their feelings, symbolize the trauma and put it into perspective, and then allow for and deal with the emotional responses. One method of achieving this is by having employees draw pictures of what they feel about the situation, and then having them explain their drawings with each other. Drawing pictures is beneficial because it allows employees to express emotions they normally would not be able to put into words.

Also, drawings often prompt active participation in the activity, as everyone is required to draw a picture and then discuss its meaning.

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The use of new technologies combined with globalization has also shifted the field of organization development. Roland Sullivan (2005) defined Organization Development with participants at the 1st Organization Development Conference for Asia in Dubai-2005 as "Organization Development is a transformative leap to a desired vision where strategies and systems align, in the light of local culture with an innovative and authentic leadership style using the support of high tech tools.

Action Research Wendell L French and Cecil Bell defined organization development (OD) at one point as "organization improvement through action research". If one idea can be said to summarize OD's underlying philosophy, it would be action research as it was conceptualized by Kurt Lewin and later elaborated and expanded on by other behavioral scientists. Concerned with social change and, more particularly, with effective, permanent social change, Lewin believed that the motivation to change was strongly related to action: If people are active in decisions affecting them, they are more likely to adopt new ways. "Rational social management", he said, "proceeds in a spiral of steps, each of which is composed of a circle of planning, action, and fact-finding about the result of action".

Figure 1: Systems Model of Action-Research Process Lewin's description of the process of change involves three steps: "Unfreezing": Faced with a dilemma or disconfirmation, the individual or group becomes aware of a need to change.

"Changing": The situation is diagnosed and new models of behavior are explored and tested.

"Refreezing": Application of new behavior is evaluated, and if reinforced, adopted.

Figure 1 summarizes the steps and processes involved in planned change through action research. Action research is depicted as a cyclical process of change. The cycle begins with a series of planning actions initiated by the client and the change agent working together. The Page 17 of 120

principal elements of this stage include a preliminary diagnosis, data gathering, feedback of results, and joint action planning. In the language of systems theory, this is the input phase, in which the client system becomes aware of problems as yet unidentified, realizes it may need outside help to effect changes, and shares with the consultant the process of problem diagnosis.

The second stage of action research is the action, or transformation, phase. This stage includes actions relating to learning processes (perhaps in the form of role analysis) and to planning and executing behavioral changes in the client organization. As shown in Figure 1, feedback at this stage would move via Feedback Loop A and would have the effect of altering previous planning to bring the learning activities of the client system into better alignment with change objectives.

Included in this stage is action-planning activity carried out jointly by the consultant and members of the client system. Following the workshop or learning sessions, these action steps are carried out on the job as part of the transformation stage.

The third stage of action research is the output, or results, phase. This stage includes actual changes in behavior (if any) resulting from corrective action steps taken following the second stage. Data are again gathered from the client system so that progress can be determined and necessary adjustments in learning activities can be made. Minor adjustments of this nature can be made in learning activities via Feedback Loop B (see Figure 1).

Major adjustments and reevaluations would return the OD project to the first, or planning, stage for basic changes in the program. The action-research model shown in Figure 1 closely follows Lewin's repetitive cycle of planning, action, and measuring results. It also illustrates other aspects of Lewin's general model of change. As indicated in the diagram, the planning stage is a period of unfreezing, or problem awareness. The action stage is a period of changing, that is, trying out new forms of behavior in an effort to understand and cope with the system's problems.

(There is inevitable overlap between the stages, since the boundaries are not clear-cut and cannot be in a continuous process). The results stage is a period of refreezing, in which new behaviors are tried out on the job and, if successful and reinforcing, become a part of the system's repertoire of problem-solving behavior.

Action research is problem centered, client centered, and action oriented. It involves the client system in a diagnostic, active-learning, problem-finding, and problem-solving process. Data are not simply returned in the form of a written report but instead are fed back in open joint sessions, and the client and the change agent collaborate in identifying and ranking specific problems, in devising methods for finding their real causes, and in developing plans for coping with them realistically and practically. Scientific method in the form of data gathering, forming hypotheses, testing hypotheses, and measuring results, although not pursued as rigorously as in the

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laboratory, is nevertheless an integral part of the process. Action research also sets in motion a long-range, cyclical, self-correcting mechanism for maintaining and enhancing the effectiveness of the client's system by leaving the system with practical and useful tools for self-analysis and self-renewal.[4]

OD Interventions "Interventions" are principal learning processes in the "action" stage (see Figure 1) of organization development. Interventions are structured activities used individually or in combination by the members of a client system to improve their social or task performance. They may be introduced by a change agent as part of an improvement program, or they may be used by the client following a program to check on the state of the organization's health, or to effect necessary changes in its own behavior. "Structured activities" mean such diverse procedures as experiential exercises, questionnaires, attitude surveys, interviews, relevant group discussions, and even lunchtime meetings between the change agent and a member of the client organization.

Every action that influences an organization's improvement program in a change agent-client system relationship can be said to be an intervention.

There are many possible intervention strategies from which to choose. Several assumptions about the nature and functioning of organizations are made in the choice of a particular strategy.

Beckhard lists six such assumptions: 1. The basic building blocks of an organization are groups (teams). Therefore, the basic units of change are groups, not individuals.

2. An always relevant change goal is the reduction of inappropriate competition between parts of the organization and the development of a more collaborative condition.

3. Decision making in a healthy organization is located where the information sources are, rather than in a particular role or level of hierarchy.

4. Organizations, subunits of organizations, and individuals continuously manage their affairs against goals. Controls are interim measurements, not the basis of managerial strategy.

5. One goal of a healthy organization is to develop generally open communication, mutual trust, and confidence between and across levels.

6. People support what they help create. People affected by a change must be allowed active participation and a sense of ownership in the planning and conduct of the change.

Interventions range from those designed to improve the effectiveness of individuals through those designed to deal with teams and groups, intergroup relations, and the total organization.

There are interventions that focus on task issues (what people do), and those that focus on process issues (how people go about doing it). Finally, interventions may be roughly classified according to which change mechanism they tend to emphasize: for example, feedback, awareness of changing cultural norms, interaction and communication, conflict, and education through either new knowledge or skill practice.

One of the most difficult tasks confronting the change agent is to help create in the client system a safe climate for learning and change. In a favorable climate, human learning builds on itself Page 19 of 120

and continues indefinitely during man's lifetime. Out of new behavior, new dilemmas and problems emerge as the spiral continues upward to new levels. In an unfavorable climate, in contrast, learning is far less certain, and in an atmosphere of psychological threat, it often stops altogether. Unfreezing old ways can be inhibited in organizations because the climate makes employees feel that it is inappropriate to reveal true feelings, even though such revelations could be constructive. In an inhibited atmosphere, therefore, necessary feedback is not available. Also, trying out new ways may be viewed as risky because it violates established norms. Such an organization may also be constrained because of the law of systems: If one part changes, other parts will become involved. Hence, it is easier to maintain the status quo. Hierarchical authority,

specialization, span of control, and other characteristics of formal systems also discourage experimentation.

The change agent must address himself to all of these hazards and obstacles. Some of the things which will help him are: 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

A real need in the client system to change Genuine support from management Setting a personal example: listening, supporting behavior A sound background in the behavioral sciences A working knowledge of systems theory‗‘ A belief in man as a rational, self-educating being fully capable of learning better ways to do things.

A few examples of interventions include team building, coaching, Large Group Interventions, mentoring, performance appraisal, downsizing, TQM, and leadership development.

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Executive Development Executive development is the whole of activities aimed at developing the skills and competencies of those that (will) have executive positions in organisations. While "executive" and "manager" and "leader" are often used interchangeably, "executive" is commonly used to signify the top 5% to 10% of the organization. Similarly, "development" and "training" and "education" are often used as synonyms, however "development" is generally seen as the more encompassing of the three in terms of activities that build skills and competencies.

While it is typical to find organizations that have dedicated corporate training & development people and processes, it is not always the case that an organization will have a dedicated executive development set of activities.

In some organizations (typically large multi-nationals), there is a separate executive development team, in other organizations executive development is handled as one of many activities by the larger corporate training group, and in yet other scenarios there is no executive development activity to speak of.

In contrast to other corporate training & development activities, which have as their core purpose to build tactical skills for employees, executive development plays a different role for the organization. Indeed some executive development is conducted for the purpose of building tactical skills (sometimes referred to as "hard skills" such as business fundamentals- finance, marketing, operations and also "soft skills" such as communication and team building), yet executive development is also used to evaluate future potential future executives as well as a mechanism for the CEO and the executive team to cascade their strategies, goals, and even elements of the culture to the rest of the management team and ultimately the organization. In the best of cases, executive development not only helps an organization execute its key strategies, it can also help provide input to the strategy creation process. In this way, executive development is much more strategic than typical corporate training & development which is used for most employees of an organization.

Philosophies and Practices There is a wide range of practices in the field of executive development today. On one hand, there are organizations that have for many years, if not decades, had very thorough executive Page 22 of 120

development functions that conduct a wide variety of high profile and highly regarded set of activities (GE's Crotonville is the classic example). On the other end of the spectrum, there are some organizations that have curtailed many of the executive development activities and spending in the wake of the economic crisis of 2008/2009. As one looks across different companies, and against the backdrop of different periods, there exists a wide variety of executive development activity.

Also, the main philosophy of executive development is quite different depending on the organization. For some, the development process has and continues to play a very strategic role in the organization- it is with and through executive development activities that organizational strategies are formed, communicated, and reinforced with senior management. In other organizations, development of executives is seen as an inherently positive activity, which, akin to insurance, is probably better to have than not. In organizations where development has not had an opportunity to prove its value, it may be seen as a waste of time and rarely something that the organization commits its leaders' precious time toward.

Reporting & Structure Most often the executive development function reports into the head of Talent Management, the head of HR, or into the Chief Learning Officer (CLO). In rare cases, it reports into an operating executive (i.e. COO). Executive development can be very effective under any reporting structure – what is key is executive level sponsorship and access to senior line leaders who can help ensure development is aligned with and supports the company's strategy.

Most often, the head of executive development will have additional resources working alongside him/her. These may be in the form of direct reports, and/or HR business partners and shared resources in the Talent Management function. While the majority of executive development professionals are the more senior talent management professionals in the organization (based on expertise, education such as graduate degree, and tenure), in some cases and perhaps more frequently organizations are putting ―outsiders‖ in charge of executive development who have not spent the bulk of their career in Talent Management or Human Resources (some examples include CBS Corporation and the U.S. Navy). Among the reasons for this are to bring a fresh perspective into the role and to bring strategy and operational expertise into the function. On the supplier side, there exists a rich ecosystem of development professionals; essentially any part of the executive development process can be procured from an outside firm or set of individual consultants and coaches.

Primary Activities Executive Development activities generally fall into two broad categories: Assessment and Development as outlined below.

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Assessment   

Capability Requirements – Provide input into the organization‘s strategy formulation process by identifying what is required of executives from a capability perspective Capability Assessment – Measure existing capabilities against required capabilities Gap Analysis – Identify gap between requirements and current assessment, with an eye toward what capabilities can be ―built‖ (development) vs. ―bought‖ external hiring

Development   



Segment executive population– Create groupings of executives, by level, geography, business unit, or other affiliation (C-suite track, high potential‘s, critical roles etc.)

Architect – Create development activities and experiences for the different segmentations Deliver – Coordinate across the ecosystem of internal and external partners to deliver development experiences and manage execution of executive development initiatives, etc.

Measure & Refine – Conduct post activity ROI (typically Kirkpatrick Level I-IV), make course corrections, summarize and report results

Some of the adjacent Talent Management activities that executive development may have involvement with include the succession planning process (typically not CEO or CEO -1, but below), executive onboarding (ideally both external hiring and internal changes), structuring on the job developmental assignments, and working with alumni of development programs, and alumni of the organization.

Developmental Options Executive development professionals have a wide variety of activities they can choose to deploy including in order of most commonly found:       

OTJ (On the job) stretch assignments, line and staff roles, rotational assignments Executive coaching Mentoring Custom workshops and activities Action learning Business school open enrollment courses Online courses and resources

Best Practices The following are a set of best practices most often found in organizations that have long standing development activities which are highly regarded in and outside of the organization. 

Articulate a clear and compelling vision – Leaders have many competing priorities, and need a compelling set of reasons to support development activities. The development Page 24 of 120







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team needs to build a compelling case and consistent themes across its development strategy.

Build support across key sponsors - Executive development professionals need to have a deep set of contacts both inside of the organization and across many functions and outside with thought leaders and experts. Many organizations have found that Advisory Boards, which seek to create a formal process of soliciting the input from stakeholders as highly effective. Relationships with internal executives, who are increasingly used as ―faculty‖ to delivery development, are important to nurture. A strong professional network is the ―currency‖ of the development professional.

Ground development in business challenges – When in doubt, development that is rooted in solving current and significant business challenges will always prevail over development that is designed to round out a leader or a group of professionals.

Shorten the timeline – Especially in light of budget cutbacks that are all too common in organizations today, it is important that development is focused on solving current operating cycle issues and challenges. Development plans that span many quarters risk never being fully implemented.

Market successes – Successful development professionals, like any other professionals in the organization, are quite good at highlighting their impact for the organization and making sure to create "buzz" for their work and activities. Whether through formal ROI studies or informal anecdotal reviews that are circulated to strategic individuals, it is key to promote success.

Executive Development 2.0 Below are key factors that are impacting the field of executive development: 

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Time frame – The speed with which organizations need to revise strategies, launch new products and services, expand their global footprint, etc. continues to accelerate; more rapid means of enabling the organization and its leaders to make these changes are required from the development function.

Share of mind – Executives are incredibly taxed with an increasing set of responsibilities; mid-level management has been reduced and the number of stakeholders (community, environment, government, etc.) has increased, all putting incredible pressure on leaders.

Development that is not of immediate value risks elimination.

Budget – The current economic situation has put great pressure on all expenses across the organization, executive development is no exception. Centralized development budgets are all targets, while certain activities such as executive coaching that may be paid out of a business unit budget may be more insulated from cutbacks.

"Bottom line" HR – As many organizations have become more results oriented and quantitative for all support functions, there is increased pressure for HR and all of its components to "raise its game" and prove in business terms its impact.

These factors are creating a new operating context for executive development professionals. In response to this new environment, The Institute of Executive Development has articulated a vision of what Executive Development 2.0 will look like:

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     

The purpose of the function is to drive the organizational strategy (not solely build skills) The content will be based on current business imperatives The timeline is focused on the immediate 12 months, not longer The format will include more on the job and action learning (vs. formal workshops and programs) The audience will include stakeholders such as customers and partners The budget will be measured more in terms of investment of executive's time (vs. funds)

While executive development continues to become enriched by many approaches, one approach, adult development and its subfield Positive Adult Development is beginning to create opportunities for what has been essentially reserved for academic research to become an increasing part of executive practices.

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Leadership Development Leadership Development refers to any activity that enhances the quality of leadership within an individual or organization. These activities have ranged from MBA style programs offered at university business schools to action learning, high-ropes courses and executive retreats.

Developing Individual Leaders Traditionally, leadership development has focused on developing the leadership abilities and attitudes of individuals.

Just as people are not all born with the ability or desire to play football (soccer) like Zinedine Zidane or to sing like Luciano Pavarotti, people are not all born with the ability to lead. Different personal traits and characteristics can help or hinder a person's leadership effectiveness and require formalized programs for developing leadership competencies Classroom-style training and associated reading is effective in helping leaders to know more about what is involved in leading well. However, knowing what to do and doing what one knows are two very different outcomes; management expert Henry Mintzberg is one person to highlight this dilemma. It is estimated that as little as 15% of learning from traditional classroom-style training results in sustained behavioral change within workplaces.

The success of leadership development efforts has been linked to three variables: 1. individual learner characteristics 2. the quality and nature of the leadership development program 3. genuine support for behavioral change from the leader's supervisor Military officer-training academies, such as the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, go to great lengths to accept only candidates who show the highest potential to lead well. Personal characteristics that are associated with successful leadership development include leader motivation to learn, a high achievement drive and personality traits such as openness to experience, an internal focus of control, and self-monitoring.

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Development is also more likely to occur when the design of the development program: 



integrates a range of developmental experiences over a set period of time (e.g. 6–12 months). These experiences may include 360 degree feedback, experiential classroom style programs, business school style coursework, executive coaching, reflective journaling, mentoring and more. involves goal-setting, following an assessment of key developmental needs and then an evaluation of the achievement of goals after a given time period

Among key concepts in leadership development one may find: 



 

experiential learning: positioning the individual in the focus of the learning process, going through the four stages of experiential learning as formulated by David A. Kolb: 1. concrete experience 2. observation and reflection 3. forming abstract concept 4. testing in new situations. self efficacy: the right training and coaching should bring about 'Self efficacy' in the trainee, as Albert Bandura formulated: a person's belief about his capabilities to produce effects visioning: Developing the ability to formulate a clear image of the aspired future of an organization unit. attitude: attitude plays a major role in being a leader.

A good personal leadership development program should enable one to develop a plan that helps one gain essential leadership skills required for roles across a wide spectrum from a youth environment to the corporate world.

Developing Leadership at a Collective Level More recently, organizations have come to understand that leadership can also be developed by strengthening the connection between, and alignment of, the efforts of individual leaders and the systems through which they influence organizational operations. This has led to a differentiation between leader development and leadership development. Quinn [1]'s 1996 book of the same title.

Leadership development can build on the development of individuals (including followers) to become leaders. In addition, it also needs to focus on the interpersonal linkages between the individuals in the team.

In the belief that the most important resource that an organization possesses is the people that comprise the organization, some organizations address the development of these resources (even including the leadership).

In contrast, the concept of "Employeeship" recognizes that what it takes to be a good leader is not too dissimilar to what it takes to be a good employee. Therefore, bringing the notional leader together with the team to explore these similarities (rather than focusing on the differences)

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brings positive results. This approach has been particularly successful in Sweden where the power distance between manager and team is small.

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Group Dynamics Group Dynamics is a system of behaviors and psychological processes occurring within a social group (intragroup dynamics), or between social groups (intergroup dynamics). The study of group dynamics can be useful in understanding decision-making behavior, tracking the spread of diseases in society, creating effective therapy techniques, and following the emergence and popularity of new ideas and technologies. Group dynamics are at the core of understanding racism, sexism, and other forms of social prejudice and discrimination. These applications of the field are studied in psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science, epidemiology, education, social work, business, and communication studies.

History The history of group dynamics (or group processes) has a consistent, underlying premise: 'the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.' A social group is an entity, which has qualities that cannot be understood just by studying the individuals that make up the group. In 1924, Gestalt psychologist, Max Wertheimer identified this fact, stating ‗There are entities where the behavior of the whole cannot be derived from its individual elements nor from the way these elements fit together; rather the opposite is true: the properties of any of the parts are determined by the intrinsic structural laws of the whole‘ (Wertheimer 1924, p. 7).

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As a field of study, group dynamics has roots in both psychology and sociology. Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920), credited as the founder of experimental psychology, had a particular interest in the psychology of communities, which he believed possessed phenomena (human language, customs, and religion) that could not be described through a study of the individual. On the sociological side, Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), who was influenced by Wundt, also recognized collective phenomena, such as public knowledge. Other key theorists include Gustave Le Bon (1841–1931) who believed that crowds possessed a 'racial unconscious' with primitive, aggressive, and antisocial instincts, and William McDougall (psychologist), who believed in a 'group mind,' which had a distinct existence born from the interaction of individuals.

Ultimately, it was social psychologist Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) who coined the term group dynamics to describe the positive and negative forces within groups of people. In 1945, he established The Group Dynamics Research Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the first institute devoted explicitly to the study of group dynamics. Throughout his career, Lewin was focused on how the study of group dynamics could be applied to real-world, social issues.

An increasing amount of research has applied evolutionary psychology principles to group dynamics. Humans are argued to have evolved in an increasingly complicated social environment and to have many adaptations concerned with group dynamics. Examples include mechanisms for dealing with status, reciprocity, identifying cheaters, ostracism, altruism, group decision, leadership, and intergroup relations.

Key Theorists Gustave Le Bon Gustave Le Bon was a French social psychologist whose seminal study, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1896) led to the development of group psychology.

William McDougall The British psychologist William McDougall in his work The Group Mind (1920) researched the dynamics of groups of various sizes and degrees of organization.

Sigmund Freud In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, (1922), Sigmund Freud based his preliminary description of group psychology on Le Bon's work, but went on to develop his own, original theory, related to what he had begun to elaborate in Totem and Taboo. Theodor Adorno reprised Freud's essay in 1951 with his Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda, and said that "It is not an overstatement if we say that Freud, though he was hardly interested in the political phase of the problem, clearly foresaw the rise and nature of fascist mass movements in purely psychological categories."

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Jacob L. Moreno Jacob L. Moreno was a psychiatrist, dramatist, philosopher and theoretician who coined the term "group psychotherapy" in the early 1930s and was highly influential at the time.

Kurt Lewin Kurt Lewin (1943, 1948, 1951) is commonly identified as the founder of the movement to study groups scientifically. He coined the term group dynamics to describe the way groups and individuals act and react to changing circumstances. Group dynamics can be defined as a field of enquiry dedicated to the advancing knowledge about the nature of groups, the laws of their development and their interrelations with individuals, other groups and larger institutions. Based on their feelings and emotions, members of a group form a common perception. The interactive psychological relationship in which members of a group form this common perception is actually "Group Dynamics".

The phrase "Group Dynamics" contains two words- (i) Group- a social unit of two or more individuals who have in common a set of beliefs and values, follow the same norms and work for an establishable common aim. The members of the group share a set of common purpose, tasks or goals. (ii) Dynamics- the flow of, coherent activities which as envisaged, will lead the group towards the establishment of its set goals.

William Schutz William Schutz (1958, 1966) looked at interpersonal relations from the perspective of three dimensions: inclusion, control, and affection. This became the basis for a theory of group behavior that sees groups as resolving issues in each of these stages in order to be able to develop to the next stage. Conversely, a group may also devolve to an earlier stage if unable to resolve outstanding issues in a particular stage. He referred to these group dynamics as "the interpersonal underworld" because they dealt with group processes that were largely unseen, as opposed to "content" issues, which were nominally the agenda of group meetings.

Wilfred Bion Wilfred Bion (1961) studied group dynamics from a psychoanalytic perspective, and stated that he was much influenced by Wilfred Trotter for whom he worked at University College Hospital London, as did another key figure in the Psychoanalytic movement, Ernest Jones. He discovered several mass group processes which involved the group as a whole adopting an orientation which, in his opinion, interfered with the ability of a group to accomplish the work it was nominally engaged in. His experiences are reported in his published books, especially Experiences in Groups. The Tavistock Institute has further developed and applied the theory and practices developed by Bion.

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Bruce Tuckman Bruce Tuckman (1965) proposed the four-stage model called Tuckman's Stages for a group.

Tuckman's model states that the ideal group decision-making process should occur in four stages:    

Forming (pretending to get on or get along with others) Storming (letting down the politeness barrier and trying to get down to the issues even if tempers flare up) Norming (getting used to each other and developing trust and productivity) Performing (working in a group to a common goal on a highly efficient and cooperative basis)

Tuckman later added a fifth stage for the dissolution of a group called adjourning. (Adjourning may also be referred to as mourning, i.e. mourning the adjournment of the group). This model refers to the overall pattern of the group, but of course individuals within a group work in different ways. If distrust persists, a group may never even get to the norming stage.

M. Scott Peck M. Scott Peck developed stages for larger-scale groups (i.e., communities) which are similar to Tuckman's stages of group development. Peck describes the stages of a community as:    

Pseudo-community Chaos Emptiness True Community

Communities may be distinguished from other types of groups, in Peck's view, by the need for members to eliminate barriers to communication in order to be able to form true community.

Examples of common barriers are: expectations and preconceptions; prejudices; ideology, counterproductive norms, theology and solutions; the need to heal, convert, fix or solve and the need to control. A community is born when its members reach a stage of "emptiness" or peace.

Richard Hackman Richard Hackman developed a synthetic, research-based model for designing and managing work groups. Hackman suggested that groups are successful when they satisfy internal and external clients, develop capabilities to perform in the future, and when members find meaning and satisfaction in the group. Hackman proposed five conditions that increase the chance that groups will be successful. These include: 1. Being a real team: which results from having a shared task, clear boundaries which clarify who is inside or outside of the group, and stability in group membership.

2. Compelling direction: which results from a clear, challenging, and consequential goal.

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3. Enabling structure: which results from having tasks which have variety, a group size that is not too large, talented group members who have at least moderate social skill, and strong norms that specify appropriate behavior.

4. Supportive context: that occurs in groups nested in larger groups (e.g. companies). In companies, supportive contexts involves a) reward systems that reward performance and cooperation (e.g. group based rewards linked to group performance), b) an educational system that develops member skills, c) an information and materials system that provides the needed information and raw materials (e.g. computers).

5. Expert coaching: which occurs on the rare occasions when group members feels they need help with task or interpersonal issues. Hackman emphasizes that many team leaders are overbearing and undermine group effectiveness.

Intragroup Dynamics Intragroup dynamics (also referred to as ingroup-, within-group, or commonly just ‗group dynamics‘) are the underlying processes that give rise to a set of norms, roles, relations, and common goals that characterize a particular social group. Examples of groups include religious, political, military, and environmental groups, sports teams, work groups, and therapy groups.

Amongst the members of a group, there is a state of interdependence, through which the behaviors, attitudes, opinions, and experiences of each member are collectively influenced by the other group members. In many fields of research, there is an interest in understanding how group dynamics influence individual behavior, attitudes, and opinions.

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The dynamics of a particular group depend on how one defines the boundaries of the group.

Often, there are distinct subgroups within a more broadly defined group. For example, one could define U.S. residents (‗Americans‘) as a group, but could also define a more specific set of U.S. residents (for example, 'Americans in the South'). For each of these groups, there are distinct dynamics that can be discussed. Notably, on this very broad level, the study of group dynamics is similar to the study of culture. For example, there are group dynamics in the U.S. South that sustain a culture of honor, which is associated with norms of toughness, honor-related violence, and self-defense.

Group Formation Group formation starts with a psychological bond between individuals. The social cohesion approach suggests that group formation comes out of bonds of interpersonal attraction.[2] In contrast, the social identity approach suggests that a group starts when a collection of individuals perceive that they share some social category (‗smokers‘, ‗nurses,‘ ‗students,‘ ‗hockey players‘), and that interpersonal attraction only secondarily enhances the connection between individuals.

Additionally, from the social identity approach, group formation involves both identifying with some individuals and explicitly not identifying with others. So to say, a level of psychological distinctiveness is necessary for group formation. Through interaction, individuals begin to develop group norms, roles, and attitudes which define the group, and are internalized to influence behavior.

Emergent groups arise from a relatively spontaneous process of group formation. For example, in response to a natural disaster, an emergent response group may form. These groups are characterized as having no preexisting structure (e.g. group membership, allocated roles) or prior experience working together. Yet, these groups still express high levels of interdependence and coordinate knowledge, resources, and tasks.

Group Membership and Social Identity The social group is a critical source of information about individual identity. An individual‘s identity (or self-concept) has two components: personal identity and social identity (or collective self). One‘s personal identity is defined by more idiosyncratic, individual qualities and attributes.

In contrast, one‘s social identity is defined by his or her group membership, and the general characteristics (or prototypes) that define the group and differentiate it from others. We naturally make comparisons between our own group and other groups, but we do not necessarily make objective comparisons. Instead, we make evaluations that are self-enhancing, emphasizing the positive qualities of our own group (see ingroup bias). In this way, these comparisons give us a distinct and valued social identity that benefits our self-esteem. Our social identity and group membership also satisfies a need to belong. Of course, individuals belong to multiple groups.

Therefore, one‘s social identity can have several, qualitatively distinct parts (for example, one‘s ethnic identity, religious identity, and political identity).

Optimal distinctiveness theory suggests that individuals have a desire to be similar to others, but also a desire to differentiate themselves, ultimately seeking some balance of these two desires (to obtain optimal distinctiveness). For example, one might imagine a young teenager in the United Page 37 of 120

States who tries to balance these desires, not wanting to be ‗just like everyone else,‘ but also wanting to ‗fit in‘ and be similar to others. One‘s collective self may offer a balance between these two desires. That is, to be similar to others (those who you share group membership with), but also to be different from others (those who are outside of your group).

Group Cohesion In the social sciences, group cohesion refers to the processes that keep members of a social group connected. Terms such as attraction, solidarity, and morale are often used to describe group cohesion. It is thought to be one of the most important characteristics of a group, and has been linked to group performance, intergroup conflict and therapeutic change.

Group cohesion, as a scientifically studied property of groups, is commonly associated with Kurt Lewin and his student, Leon Festinger. Lewin defined group cohesion as the willingness of individuals to stick together, and believed that without cohesiveness a group could not exist. As an extension of Lewin‘s work, Festinger (along with Stanley Schachter and Kurt Back) described cohesion as, ―the total field of forces which act on members to remain in the group‖ (Festinger, Schachter, & Back, 1950, p. 37). Later, this definition was modified to describe the forces acting on individual members to remain in the group, termed attraction to the group. Since then, several models for understanding the concept of group cohesion have been developed, including Albert Carron‘s hierarchical model and several bi-dimensional models (vertical v. horizontal cohesion, task v. social cohesion, belongingness and morale, and personal v. social attraction). Before Lewin and Festinger, there were, of course, descriptions of a very similar group property. For example, Emile Durkheim described two forms of solidarity (mechanical and organic), which created a sense of collective conscious and an emotion-based sense of community.

Black Sheep Effect Beliefs within the ingroup are based on how individuals in the group see their other members. Individuals tend to upgrade likeable in-group members and deviate from unlikeable group members, making them a separate outgroup. This is called the black sheep effect. A person's beliefs about the group may be changed depending upon whether they are part of the ingroup or outgroup.

New members of a group must prove themselves to the full members, or ―old-timers‖, to become accepted. Full members have undergone socialization and are already accepted within the group.

They have more privilege than newcomers but more responsibility to help the group achieve its goals. Marginal members were once full members but lost membership because they failed to live up to the group‘s expectations. They can rejoin the group if they go through re-socialization.

In a Bogart and Ryan study, the development of new members' stereotypes about in-groups and out-groups during socialization was surveyed. Results showed that the new members judged themselves as consistent with the stereotypes of their in-groups, even when they had recently committed to join those groups or existed as marginal members. They also tended to judge the group as a whole in an increasingly less positive manner after they became full members.

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Depending on the self-esteem of an individual, members of the in-group may experience different private beliefs about the group‘s activities but will publicly express the opposite—that they actually share these beliefs. One member may not personally agree with something the group does, but to avoid the black sheep effect, they will publicly agree with the group and keep the private beliefs to themselves. If the person is privately self-aware, he or she is more likely to comply with the group even if they possibly have their own beliefs about the situation.

In situations of hazing within fraternities and sororities on college campuses, pledges may encounter this type of situation and may outwardly comply with the tasks they are forced to do regardless of their personal feelings about the Greek institution they are joining. This is done in an effort to avoid becoming an outcast of the group. Outcasts who behave in a way that might jeopardize the group tend to be treated more harshly than the likeable ones in a group, creating a black sheep effect. Full members of a fraternity might treat the incoming new members harshly, causing the pledges to decide if they approve of the situation and if they will voice their disagreeing opinions about it.

Group Influence on Individual Behavior Individual behavior is influenced by the presence of others. For example, studies have found that individuals work harder and faster when others are present (see social facilitation), and that an individual‘s performance is reduced when others in the situation create distraction or conflict.

Groups also influence individual‘s decision-making processes. These include decisions related to ingroup bias, persuasion (see Asch conformity experiments), obedience (see Milgram Experiment), and groupthink. There are both positive and negative implications of group influence on individual behavior. This type of influence is often useful in the context of work settings, team sports, and political activism. However, the influence of groups on the individual

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can also generate extremely negative behaviors, evident in Nazi Germany, the My Lai Massacre, and in the Abu Ghraib prison (also see Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse).

Group Structure A group's structure is the internal framework that defines members' relations to one another over time. Frequently studied elements of group structure include roles, norms, values, communication patterns, and status differentials. Group structure has also been defined as the underlying pattern of roles, norms, and networks of relations among members that define and organize the group.

Roles can be defined as a tendency to behave, contribute and interrelate with others in a particular way. Roles may be assigned formally, but more often are defined through the process of role differentiation. Role differentiation is the degree to which different group members have specialized functions. A group with a high level of role differentiation would be categorized as having many different roles that are specialized and narrowly defined. A key role in a group is the leader, but there are other important roles as well, including task roles, relationship roles, and individual roles. Functional (task) roles are generally defined in relation to the tasks the team is expected to perform. Individuals engaged in task roles focus on the goals of the group and on enabling the work that members do; examples of task roles include coordinator, recorder, critic, or technician. A group member engaged in a relationship role (or socioemotional role) is focused on maintaining the interpersonal and emotional needs of the groups' members; examples of relationship role include encourager, harmonizer, or compromiser.

Norms are the informal rules that groups adopt to regulate members' behaviour. Norms refer to what should be done and represent value judgments about appropriate behaviour in social situations. Although they are infrequently written down or even discussed, norms have powerful influence on group behaviour. They are a fundamental aspect of group structure as they provide direction and motivation, and organize the social interactions of members. Norms are said to be emergent, as they develop gradually throughout interactions between group members. While many norms are widespread throughout society, groups may develop their own norms that members must learn when they join the group. There are various types of norms, including: prescriptive, proscriptive, descriptive, and injunctive. 

  

Prescriptive Norms: the socially appropriate way to respond in a social situation, or what group members are supposed to do (e.g. saying thank you after someone does a favour for you) Proscriptive Norms: actions that group members should not do; prohibitive (e.g. not belching in public) Descriptive Norms: describe what people usually do (e.g. clapping after a speech) Injunctive Norms: describe behaviours that people ought to do; more evaluative in nature than a descriptive norm

Intermember Relations are the connections among the members of a group, or the social network within a group. Group members are linked to one another at varying levels. Examining the intermember relations of a group can highlight a group's density (how many members are

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linked to one another), or the degree centrality of members (number of ties between members).

Analyzing the intermember relations aspect of a group can highlight the degree centrality of each member in the group, which can lead to a better understanding of the roles of certain group (e.g. an individual who is a 'go-between' in a group will have closer ties to numerous group members which can aid in communication, etc).

Values are goals or ideas that serve as guiding principles for the group. Like norms, values may be communicated either explicitly or on an ad hoc basis. Values can serve as a rallying point for the team. However, some values (such as conformity) can also be dysfunction and lead to poor decisions by the team.

Communication patterns describe the flow of information within the group and they are typically described as either centralized or decentralized. With a centralized pattern, communications tend to flow from one source to all group members. Centralized communications allow consistent, standardization information but they may restrict the free flow of information. Decentralized communications make it easy to share information directly between group members. When decentralized, communications tend to flow more freely, but the delivery of information may not be as fast or accurate as with centralized communications.

Another potential downside of decentralized communications is the sheer volume of information that can be generated, particularly with electronic media.

Status differentials are the relative differences in status among group members. When a group is first formed the members may all be on an equal level, but over time certain members may acquire status and authority within the group; this can create what is known as a pecking order within a group. Status can be determined by a variety of factors and characteristics, including specific status characteristics (e.g. task-specific behavioural and personal characteristics, such as experience) or diffuse status characteristics (e.g. age, race, ethnicity). It is important that other group members perceive an individual's status to be warranted and deserved, as otherwise they may not have authority within the group. Status differentials may affect the relative amount of pay among group members and they may also affect the group's tolerance to violation of group norms (e.g. people with higher status may be given more freedom to violate group norms).

Group Performance Forsyth suggests that while many daily tasks undertaken by individuals could be performed in isolation, the preference is to perform with other people.

Social Facilitation and Performance Gains In a study of dynamogenic stimulation for the purpose of explaining pacemaking and competition in 1898, Norman Triplett theorized that ―the bodily presence of another rider is a stimulus to the racer in arousing the competitive instinct...‖. This dynamogenic factor is believed to have laid the groundwork for what is now known as social facilitation—an ―improvement in task performance that occurs when people work in the presence of other people‖.

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Further to Triplett‘s observation, in 1920, Floyd Allport found that although people in groups were more productive than individuals, the quality of their product/effort was inferior.

In 1965, Robert Zajonc expanded the study of arousal response (originated by Triplett) with further research in the area of social facilitation. In his study, Zajonc considered two experimental paradigms. In the first—audience effects—Zajonc observed behaviour in the presence of passive spectators, and the second—co-action effects—he examined behaviour in the presence of another individual engaged in the same activity.

Zajonc observed two categories of behaviours—dominant responses to tasks that are easier to learn and which dominate other potential responses and nondominant responses to tasks that are less likely to be performed. In his Theory of Social Facilitation, Zajonc concluded that in the presence of others, when action is required, depending on the task requirement, either social facilitation or social interference will impact the outcome of the task. If social facilitation occurs, the task will have required a dominant response from the individual resulting in better performance in the presence of others, whereas if social interference occurs the task will have elicited a nondominant response from the individual resulting in subpar performance of the task.

Several theories analyzing performance gains in groups via drive, motivational, cognitive and personality processes, explain why social facilitation occurs.

Zajonc hypothesized that compresence (the state of responding in the presence of others) elevates an individual‘s drive level which in turn triggers social facilitation when tasks are simple and easy to execute, but impedes performance when tasks are challenging.

Nickolas Cottrell, 1972, proposed the Evaluation Apprehension Model whereby he suggested people associate social situations with an evaluative process. Cottrell argued this situation is met

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with apprehension and it is this motivational response, not arousal/elevated drive, that is responsible for increased productivity on simple tasks and decreased productivity on complex tasks in the presence of others.

In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), Erving Goffman assumes that individuals can control how they are perceived by others. He suggests that people fear being perceived as having negative, undesirable qualities and characteristics by other people, and that it is this fear that compels individuals to portray a positive self-presentation/social image of themselves. In relation to performance gains, Goffman‘s ‗‗‗self-presentation theory‘‘‘ predicts, in situations where they may be evaluated, individuals will consequently increase their efforts in order to project/preserve/maintain a positive image.

Distraction-Conflict theory contends that when a person is working in the presence of other people, an interference effect occurs splitting the individual‘s attention between the task and the other person. On simple tasks, where the individual is not challenged by the task, the interference effect is negligible and performance, therefore, is facilitated. On more complex tasks, where drive is not strong enough to effectively compete against the effects of distraction, there is no performance gain. The Stroop task (Stroop effect) demonstrated that, by narrowing a person‘s focus of attention on certain tasks, distractions can improve performance.

Social orientation theory considers the way a person approaches social situations. It predicts that self-confident individuals with a positive outlook will show performance gains through social facilitation, whereas a self-conscious individual approaching social situations with apprehension is less likely to perform well due to social interference effects.

Intergroup Dynamics Intergroup dynamics refers to the behavioral and psychological relationship between two or more groups. This includes perceptions, attitudes, opinions, and behaviors towards one‘s own group, as well as those towards another group. In some cases, intergroup dynamics is prosocial, positive, and beneficial (for example, when multiple research teams work together to accomplish a task or goal). In other cases, intergroup dynamics can create conflict. For example, Fischer & Ferlie found initially positive dynamics between a clinical institution and its external authorities dramatically changed to a 'hot' and intractable conflict when authorities interfered with its embedded clinical model. Similarly, underlying the 1999 Columbine High School shooting in Littleton, Colorado, United States, intergroup dynamics played a significant role in Eric Harris‘ and Dylan Klebold‘s decision to kill a teacher and 14 students (including themselves).

Intergroup Conflict According to social identity theory, intergroup conflict starts with a process of comparison between individuals in one group (the ingroup) to those of another group (the outgroup). This comparison process is not unbiased and objective. Instead, it is a mechanism for enhancing one‘s self-esteem. In the process of such comparisons, an individual tends to: 

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  

exaggerate and overgeneralize the differences between the ingroup and the outgroup (to enhance group distinctiveness) minimize the perception of differences between ingroup members remember more detailed and positive information about the ingroup, and more negative information about the outgroup

Even without any intergroup interaction (as in the minimal group paradigm), individuals begin to show favoritism towards their own group, and negative reactions towards the outgroup. This conflict can result in prejudice, stereotypes, and discrimination. Intergroup conflict can be highly competitive, especially for social groups with a long history of conflict (for example, the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, rooted in group conflict between the ethnic Hutu and Tutsi). In contrast, intergroup competition can sometimes be relatively harmless, particularly in situations where there is little history of conflict (for example, between students of different universities) leading to relatively harmless generalizations and mild competitive behaviors. Intergroup conflict is commonly recognized amidst racial, ethnic, religious, and political groups.

The formation of intergroup conflict was investigated in a popular series of studies by Muzafer Sherif and colleagues in 1961, called the Robbers Cave Experiment. The Robbers Cave Experiment was later used to support realistic conflict theory. Other prominent theories relating to intergroup conflict include social dominance theory, and social-/self-categorization theory.

Intergroup Conflict Reduction There have been several strategies developed for reducing the tension, bias, prejudice, and conflict between social groups. These include the contact hypothesis, the jigsaw classroom, and several categorization-based strategies.

Contact Hypothesis (Intergroup Contact Theory) In 1954, Gordon Allport suggested that by promoting contact between groups, prejudice can be reduced. Further, he suggested four optimal conditions for contact: equal status between the groups in the situation; common goals; intergroup cooperation; and the support of authorities, law, or customs. Since then, over 500 studies have been done on prejudice reduction under variations of the contact hypothesis, and a meta-analytic review suggests overall support for its efficacy. In some cases, even without the four optimal conditions outlined by Allport, prejudice between groups can be reduced.

Superordinate Identities Under the contact hypothesis, several models have been developed. A number of these models utilize a superordinate identity to reduce prejudice. That is, a more broadly defined, ‗umbrella‘ group/identity that includes the groups that are in conflict. By emphasizing this superordinate identity, individuals in both subgroups can share a common social identity. For example, if there is conflict between White, Black, and Latino students in a high school, one might try to emphasize the ‗high school‘ group/identity that students share to reduce conflict between the groups. Models utilizing superordinate identities include the common ingroup identity model, the Page 44 of 120

ingroup projection model, the mutual intergroup differentiation model, and the ingroup identity model.

Interdependence There are also techniques for reducing prejudice that utilize interdependence between two or more groups. That is, members across groups have to rely on one another to accomplish some goal or task. In the Robbers Cave Experiment, Sherif used this strategy to reduce conflict between groups. Elliot Aronson‘s Jigsaw Classroom also uses this strategy of interdependence.

In 1971, thick racial tensions were abounding in Austin, Texas. Aronson was brought in to examine the nature of this tension within schools, and to devise a strategy for reducing it (so to improve the process of school integration, mandated under Brown v. Board of Education in 1954). Despite strong evidence for the effectiveness of the jigsaw classroom, the strategy was not widely used (arguably because of strong attitudes existing outside of the schools, which still resisted the notion that racial and ethnic minority groups are equal to Whites and, similarly, should be integrated into schools).

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Managing Organizational Change Change Management is an approach to transitioning individuals, teams, and organizations to a desired future state. In a project management context, change management may refer to a project management process wherein changes to the scope of a project are formally introduced and approved.

History 1960s Everett Rogers wrote the book Diffusion of Innovations in 1962. There would be five editions of the book through 2003, during which time the statistical analysis of how people adopt new ideas and technology would be documented over 5000 times. The scientific study of hybrid corn seed adoption led to the commonly known groupings of types of people: Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority and Laggards.

1980s McKinsey consultant Julien Phillips first published a change management model in 1982 in the journal Human Resource Management, though it took a decade for his change management peers to catch up with him.

Robert Marshak credits the big 6 accounting firms and management consulting firms with creating the change management industry when they branded their reengineering services groups as change management services in the late 1980s.

1990s In 1994, Daryl Conner founded Conner Partners and in 1993, he wrote the book, Managing at the Speed of Change. Conner penned the analogy "burning platform" based on the 1988 Piper off shore oil rig fire (North Sea off the coast of Scotland). Conner Partners influenced the large Management Consulting firms over the 80s and 90s as firms needed to understand the human performance and adoption techniques to help ensure technology innovations were absorbed and adopted as best as possible.

2000s Linda Ackerman Anderson states in Beyond Change Management that in the late 1980s and early 1990s, top leaders, growing dissatisfied with the failures of creating and implementing changes in a top-down fashion, created the role of the change leader to take responsibility for the human side of the change. The first "State of the Change Management Industry" report in the Consultants News was published in February 1995.

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2010s In 2010, based on her book "RIMER Managing Successful Change", Christina Dean, Managing Director of Uniforte Pty Ltd, established Change Management as a formal vocation in Australia by writing the Australian National Competency Standards in Organizational and Community Change Management, which led to the developed of the first Australian Diploma of Organizational Change Management, and which is an internationally recognized qualification.

Approach Organizational change is a structured approach in an organization for ensuring that changes are smoothly and successfully implemented to achieve lasting benefits.

Reasons for Change Globalization and the constant innovation of technology result in a constantly evolving business environment. Phenomena such as social media and mobile adaptability have revolutionized business and the effect of this is an ever increasing need for change, and therefore change management. The growth in technology also has a secondary effect of increasing the availability Page 48 of 120

and therefore accountability of knowledge. Easily accessible information has resulted in unprecedented scrutiny from stockholders and the media and pressure on management.

With the business environment experiencing so much change, organizations must then learn to become comfortable with change as well. Therefore, the ability to manage and adapt to organizational change is an essential ability required in the workplace today. Yet, major and rapid organizational change is profoundly difficult because the structure, culture, and routines of organizations often reflect a persistent and difficult-to-remove "imprint" of past periods, which are resistant to radical change even as the current environment of the organization changes rapidly.

Due to the growth of technology, modern organizational change is largely motivated by exterior innovations rather than internal moves. When these developments occur, the organizations that adapt quickest create a competitive advantage for themselves, while the companies that refuse to change get left behind. This can result in drastic profit and/or market share losses.

Organizational change directly affects all departments from the entry level employee to senior management. The entire company must learn how to handle changes to the organization.

Choosing What Changes to Implement When determining which of the latest techniques or innovations to adopt, there are four major factors to be considered: 1.

2.

3.

4.

Levels, goals, and strategies Measurement system Sequence of steps Implementation and organizational change

The Change-Management Process Regardless of the many types of organizational change, the critical aspect is a company‘s ability to win the buy-in of their organization‘s employees on the change. Effectively managing organizational change is a four-step process: 1.

2.

3.

4.

Recognizing the changes in the broader business environment Developing the necessary adjustments for their company‘s needs Training their employees on the appropriate changes Winning the support of the employees with the persuasiveness of the appropriate adjustments

As a multi-disciplinary practice that has evolved as a result of scholarly research, organizational change management should begin with a systematic diagnosis of the current situation in order to determine both the need for change and the capability to change. The objectives, content, and process of change should all be specified as part of a Change Management plan.

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Change management processes should include creative marketing to enable communication between changing audiences, as well as deep social understanding about leadership‘s styles and group dynamics. As a visible track on transformation projects, Organizational Change Management aligns groups‘ expectations, communicates, integrates teams and manages people training. It makes use of performance metrics, such as financial results, operational efficiency, leadership commitment, communication effectiveness, and the perceived need for change to design appropriate strategies, in order to avoid change failures or resolve troubled change projects.

Successful change management is more likely to occur if the following are included: 1. Benefits management and realization to define measurable stakeholder aims, create a business case for their achievement (which should be continuously updated), and monitor assumptions, risks, dependencies, costs, return on investment, dis-benefits and cultural issues affecting the progress of the associated work 2. Effective communication that informs various stakeholders of the reasons for the change (why?), the benefits of successful implementation (what is in it for us, and you) as well as the details of the change (when? where? who is involved? how much will it cost? etc.)

3. Devise an effective education, training and/or skills upgrading scheme for the organization 4. Counter resistance from the employees of companies and align them to overall strategic direction of the organization 5. Provide personal counseling (if required) to alleviate any change-related fears 6. Monitoring of the implementation and fine-tuning as required

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Organizational Culture Diagnostics & ReEngineering

What‘s Beneath the Surface?

Organizational Culture is the behavior of humans within an organization and the meaning that people attach to those behaviors. According to Needle (2004), organizational culture represents the collective values, beliefs and principles of organizational members and is a product of such factors as history, product, market, technology, and strategy, type of employees, management style, and national culture.

Culture includes the organization's vision, values, norms, systems, symbols, language, assumptions, beliefs, and habits. Ravasi and Schultz (2006) wrote that organizational culture is a set of shared assumptions that guide what happens in organizations by defining appropriate behavior for various situations.

It is also the pattern of such collective behaviors and assumptions that are taught to new organizational members as a way of perceiving and, even, thinking and feeling. Thus, Page 52 of 120

organizational culture affects the way people and groups interact with each other, with clients, and with stakeholders. In addition, organizational culture may affect how much employees identify with an organization.

Schein (1992), Deal and Kennedy (2000), and Kotter (1992) advanced the idea that organizations often have very differing cultures as well as subcultures. Although a company may have its "own unique culture", in larger organizations there are sometimes co-existing or conflicting subcultures because each subculture is linked to a different management team.

Usage Organizational culture refers to culture in any type of organization including that of schools, universities, not-for-profit groups, government agencies, or business entities. In business, terms such as corporate culture and company culture are sometimes used to refer to a similar concept.

The term corporate culture became widely known in the business world in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Corporate culture was already used by managers, sociologists, and organizational theorists by the beginning of the 80s.

The related idea of organizational climate emerged in the 1960s and 70s, and the terms are now somewhat overlapping.

Part of or Equivalent to As A Part of Organization When one views organizational culture as a variable, one takes on the perspective that culture is something that characterizes an organization. Organizational culture can be manipulated and altered depending on leadership and members.[13]

The same as the organization Culture as root metaphor sees the organization as its culture, created through communication and symbols, or competing metaphors. Culture is basic with personal experience producing a variety of perspectives.

The organizational communication perspective on culture views culture in three different ways:   

Traditionalism: views culture through objective things such as stories, rituals, and symbols Interpretivism: views culture through a network of shared meanings (organization members sharing subjective meanings) Critical-interpretivism: views culture through a network of shared meanings as well as the power struggles created by a similar network of competing

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Types Several methods have been used to classify organizational culture. While there is no single "type" of organizational culture and organizational cultures vary widely from one organization to the next, commonalities do exist and some researchers have developed models to describe different indicators of organizational cultures. Some are described below:

Hofstede

Hofstede (1980) looked for differences between over 160 000 IBM employees in 50 different countries and three regions of the world, in an attempt to find aspects of culture that might influence business behavior. He suggested things about cultural differences existing in regions and nations, and the importance of international awareness and multiculturalism for the own cultural introspection. Cultural differences reflect differences in thinking and social action, and even in "mental programs", a term Hofstede uses for predictable behaviour. Hofstede relates culture to ethnic and regional groups, but also organizations, profession, family, to society and subcultural groups, national political systems and legislation, etc.

Hofstede suggests the need for changing "mental programs" with changing behavior first, which will lead to value change. Though certain groups like Jews, Gypsies and Basques have maintained their identity through centuries, their values show adaptation to the dominant cultural environment.

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Hofstede demonstrated that there are national and regional cultural groupings that affect the behavior of organizations and identified four dimensions of culture (later five) in his study of national cultures: 





Power distance (Mauk Mulder, 1977) - Different societies find different solutions on social inequality. Although invisible, inside organizations power inequality of the "bosssubordinates relationships" is functional and according to Hofstede reflects the way inequality is addressed in the society. "According to Mulder's Power Distance Reduction theory subordinates will try to reduce the power distance between themselves and their bosses and bosses will try to maintain or enlarge it", but there is also a degree to which a society expects there to be differences in the levels of power. A high score suggests that there is an expectation that some individuals wield larger amounts of power than others.

A low score reflects the view that all people should have equal rights.

Uncertainty avoidance is the coping with uncertainty about the future. Society copes with it with technology, law and religion (however different societies have different ways of addressing it), and according to Hofstede organizations deal with it with technology, law and rituals or in two ways - rational and non-rational, with rituals being the non-rational.

Hofstede listed some of the rituals as the memos and reports, some parts of the accounting system, large part of the planning and control systems, and the nomination of experts.

Individualism vs. collectivism - disharmony of interests on personal and collective goals (Parsons and Shils, 1951). Hofstede brings about the idea that society's expectations of Individualism/Collectivism will be reflected by the employee inside the organization.

Collectivist societies will have more emotional dependence on members in their organizations; when in equilibrium - organization is expected to show responsibility on members. Extreme individualism is seen in the US. In fact, collectivism in the US is seen as "bad". Other cultures and societies US will therefore seek to resolve social and organizational problems in ways different from American ways. Hofstede says that a capitalist market economy fosters individualism and competition and depends on it but individualism is also related to the development of the middle class. Research indicates that some people and cultures might have both high individualism and high collectivism. For example, someone who highly values duty to his or her group does not necessarily give a low priority to personal freedom and self-sufficiency.

 

Masculinity vs. femininity - reflects whether a certain society is predominantly male or female in terms of cultural values, gender roles and power relations.

Long- Versus Short-Term Orientation which he describes as "The long-term orientation dimension can be interpreted as dealing with society‘s search for virtue. Societies with a short-term orientation generally have a strong concern with establishing the absolute Truth. They are normative in their thinking. They exhibit great respect for traditions, a relatively small propensity to save for the future, and a focus on achieving quick results.

In societies with a long-term orientation, people believe that truth depends very much on situation, context and time. They show an ability to adapt traditions to changed conditions, a strong propensity to save and invest, thriftiness, and perseverance in achieving results."

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These dimensions refer to the impact of national cultures on management, and can be used to adapt policies to local needs. In a follow up study, described in another model is suggested for organisational culture.

O'Reilly, Chatman, and Caldwell Two common models and their associated measurement tools have been developed by O‘Reilly et al. and Denison.

O‘Reilly, Chatman & Caldwell (1991) developed a model based on the belief that cultures can be distinguished by values that are reinforced within organizations. Their Organizational Cultural Profile (OCP) is a self reporting tool which makes distinctions according seven categories Innovation, Stability, Respect for People, Outcome Orientation, Attention to Detail, Team Orientation, and Aggressiveness. The model is also suited to measure how organizational culture effects organizational performance, as it measures most efficient persons suited in an organization and as such organizations can be termed as good organizational culture. Employee values are measured against organizational values to predict employee intentions to stay, and predict turnover. This is done through instrument like Organizational Culture Profile (OCP) to measure employee commitment.

Daniel Denison Daniel Denison‘s model (1990) asserts that organizational culture can be described by four general dimensions – Mission, Adaptability, Involvement and Consistency. Each of these general dimensions is further described by the following three sub-dimensions:    

Mission - Strategic Direction and Intent, Goals and Objectives and Vision Adaptability - Creating Change, Customer Focus and Organizational Learning Involvement - Empowerment, Team Orientation and Capability Development Consistency - Core Values, Agreement, Coordination/Integration

Denison‘s model also allows cultures to be described broadly as externally or internally focused as well as flexible versus stable. The model has been typically used to diagnose cultural problems in organizations.

Deal and Kennedy Deal and Kennedy (1982) defined organizational culture as the way things get done around here.

Deal and Kennedy created a model of culture that is based on 4 different types of organizations.

They each focus on how quickly the organization receives feedback, the way members are rewarded, and the level of risks taken: 1. Work-hard, play-hard culture: This has rapid feedback/reward and low risk resulting in: Stress coming from quantity of work rather than uncertainty. High-speed action leading to high-speed recreation. Examples: Restaurants, software companies.

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2. Tough-guy macho culture: This has rapid feedback/reward and high risk, resulting in the following: Stress coming from high risk and potential loss/gain of reward. Focus on the present rather than the longer-term future. Examples: police, surgeons, sports.

3. Process culture: This has slow feedback/reward and low risk, resulting in the following: Low stress, plodding work, comfort and security. Stress that comes from internal politics and stupidity of the system. Development of bureaucracies and other ways of maintaining the status quo. Focus on security of the past and of the future. Examples: banks, insurance companies.

4. Bet-the-company culture: This has slow feedback/reward and high risk, resulting in the following: Stress coming from high risk and delay before knowing if actions have paid off. The long view is taken, but then much work is put into making sure things happen as planned. Examples: aircraft manufacturers, oil companies.

Edgar Schein According to Schein (1992), culture is the most difficult organizational attribute to change, outlasting organizational products, services, founders and leadership and all other physical attributes of the organization. His organizational model illuminates culture from the standpoint of the observer, described at three levels: artifacts, espoused values and basic underlying assumptions.

At the first and most cursory level of Schein's model is organizational attributes that can be seen, felt and heard by the uninitiated observer - collectively known as artifacts. Included are the facilities, offices, furnishings, visible awards and recognition, the way that its members dress, how each person visibly interacts with each other and with organizational outsiders, and even company slogans, mission statements and other operational creeds.

Artifacts comprise the physical components of the organization that relay cultural meaning.

Daniel Denison (1990) describes artifacts as the tangible aspects of culture shared by members of an organization. Verbal, behavioral and physical artifacts are the surface manifestations of organizational culture.

Rituals, the collective interpersonal behavior and values as demonstrated by that behavior, constitute the fabric of an organization's culture The contents of myths, stories, and sagas reveal the history of an organization and influence how people understand what their organization values and believes. Language, stories, and myths are examples of verbal artifacts and are represented in rituals and ceremonies. Technology and art exhibited by members or an organization are examples of physical artifacts.

The next level deals with the professed culture of an organization's members - the values. Shared values are individuals‘ preferences regarding certain aspects of the organization‘s culture (e.g. loyalty, customer service). At this level, local and personal values are widely expressed within the organization. Basic beliefs and assumptions include individuals' impressions about the trustworthiness and supportiveness of an organization, and are often deeply ingrained within the organization‘s culture. Organizational behavior at this level usually can be studied by

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interviewing the organization's membership and using questionnaires to gather attitudes about organizational membership.

At the third and deepest level, the organization's tacit assumptions are found. These are the elements of culture that are unseen and not cognitively identified in everyday interactions between organizational members. Additionally, these are the elements of culture which are often taboo to discuss inside the organization.

Many of these 'unspoken rules' exist without the conscious knowledge of the membership. Those with sufficient experience to understand this deepest level of organizational culture usually become acclimatized to its attributes over time, thus reinforcing the invisibility of their existence.

Surveys and casual interviews with organizational members cannot draw out these attributes— rather much more in-depth means is required to first identify then understand organizational culture at this level. Notably, culture at this level is the underlying and driving element often missed by organizational behaviorists.

Using Schein's model, understanding paradoxical organizational behaviors becomes more apparent. For instance, an organization can profess highly aesthetic and moral standards at the second level of Schein's model while simultaneously displaying curiously opposing behavior at the third and deepest level of culture.

Superficially, organizational rewards can imply one organizational norm but at the deepest level imply something completely different. This insight offers an understanding of the difficulty that organizational newcomers have in assimilating organizational culture and why it takes time to become acclimatized. It also explains why organizational change agents usually fail to achieve their goals: underlying tacit cultural norms are generally not understood before would-be change agents begin their actions.

Merely understanding culture at the deepest level may be insufficient to institute cultural change because the dynamics of interpersonal relationships (often under threatening conditions) are added to the dynamics of organizational culture while attempts are made to institute desired change.

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Factors and Elements Gerry Johnson (1988) described a cultural web, identifying a number of elements that can be used to describe or influence organizational culture:  

    

The paradigm: What the organization is about, what it does, its mission, its values.

Control systems: The processes in place to monitor what is going on. Role cultures would have vast rulebooks. There would be more reliance on individualism in a power culture.

Organizational structures: Reporting lines, hierarchies, and the way that work flows through the business.

Power structures: Who makes the decisions, how widely spread is power, and on what is power based?

Symbols: These include organizational logos and designs, but also extend to symbols of power such as parking spaces and executive washrooms.

Rituals and routines: Management meetings, board reports and so on may become more habitual than necessary.

Stories and myths: build up about people and events, and convey a message about what is valued within the organization.

These elements may overlap. Power structures may depend on control systems, which may exploit the very rituals that generate stories which may not be true.

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According to Schein (1992), the two main reasons why cultures develop in organizations is due to external adaptation and internal integration. External adaptation reflects an evolutionary approach to organizational culture and suggests that cultures develop and persist because they help an organization to survive and flourish. If the culture is valuable, then it holds the potential for generating sustained competitive advantages. Additionally, internal integration is an important function since social structures are required for organizations to exist. Organizational practices are learned through socialization at the workplace. Work environments reinforce culture on a daily basis by encouraging employees to exercise cultural values. Organizational culture is shaped by multiple factors, including the following:     

External environment Industry Size and nature of the organization‘s workforce Technologies the organization uses The organization‘s history and ownership

Communicative Indicators There are many different types of communication that contribute in creating an organizational culture:   



Metaphors such as comparing an organization to a machine or a family reveal employees‘ shared meanings of experiences at the organization.

Stories can provide examples for employees of how to or not to act in certain situations.

Rites and ceremonies combine stories, metaphors, and symbols into one. Several different kinds of rites that affect organizational culture: o Rites of passage: employees move into new roles o Rites of degradation: employees have power taken away from them o Rites of enhancement: public recognition for an employee‘s accomplishments o Rites of renewal: improve existing social structures o Rites of conflict reduction: resolve arguments between certain members or groups o Rites of integration: reawaken feelings of membership in the organization Reflexive comments are explanations, justifications, and criticisms of our own actions.

This includes: o Plans: comments about anticipated actions o Commentaries: comments about action in the present o Accounts: comments about an action or event that has already occurred Such comments reveal interpretive meanings held by the speaker as well as the social rules they follow.



Fantasy Themes are common creative interpretations of events that reflect beliefs, values, and goals of the organization. They lead to rhetorical visions, or views of the organization and its environment held by organization members.

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Schemata Schemata (plural of schema) are knowledge structures a person forms from past experiences, allowing the person to respond to similar events more efficiently in the future by guiding the processing of information. A person's schemata are created through interaction with others, and thus inherently involve communication.

Stanley G. Harris (1994) argues that five categories of in-organization schemata are necessary for organizational culture: 1. Self-in-organization schemata: a person's concept of oneself within the context of the organization, including her/his personality, roles, and behavior.

2. Person-in-organization schemata: a person's memories, impressions, and expectations of other individuals within the organization.

3. Organization schemata: a subset of person schemata, a person's generalized perspective on others as a whole in the organization.

4. Object/concept-in-organization schemata: knowledge an individual has of organization aspects other than of other persons.

5. Event-in-organization schemata: a person's knowledge of social events within an organization.

All of these categories together represent a person's knowledge of an organization.

Organizational culture is created when the schematas (schematic structures) of differing individuals across and within an organization come to resemble each other (when any one person's schemata come to resemble another person's schemata because of mutual organizational involvement), primarily done through organizational communication, as individuals directly or indirectly share knowledge and meanings.

Strong/weak Strong culture is said to exist where staff respond to stimulus because of their alignment to organizational values. In such environments, strong cultures help firms operate like well-oiled machines, engaging in outstanding execution with only minor adjustments to existing procedures as needed.

Conversely, there is weak culture where there is little alignment with organizational values, and control must be exercised through extensive procedures and bureaucracy.

Research shows that organizations that foster strong cultures have clear values that give employees a reason to embrace the culture. A "strong" culture may be especially beneficial to firms operating in the service sector since members of these organizations are responsible for delivering the service and for evaluations important constituents make about firms. Research indicates that organizations may derive the following benefits from developing strong and productive cultures: 

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   

High employee motivation and loyalty Increased team cohesiveness among the company's various departments and divisions Promoting consistency and encouraging coordination and control within the company Shaping employee behavior at work, enabling the organization to be more efficient

Where culture is strong, people do things because they believe it is the right thing to do, and there is a risk of another phenomenon, groupthink. "Groupthink" was described by Irving Janis.

He defined it as "a quick and easy way to refer to a mode of thinking that people engage when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members' strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternatives of action." (Irving Janis, 1972, p. 9) This is a state in which even if they have different ideas, do not challenge organizational thinking, and therefore there is a reduced capacity for innovative thoughts. This could occur, for example, where there is heavy reliance on a central charismatic figure in the organization, or where there is an evangelical belief in the organization' values, or also in groups where a friendly climate is at the base of their identity (avoidance of conflict). In fact, groupthink is very common and happens all the time, in almost every group. Members that are defiant are often turned down or seen as a negative influence by the rest of the group because they bring conflict.

Healthy Organizations should strive for what is considered a "healthy" organizational culture in order increase productivity, growth, efficiency and reduce counterproductive behavior and turnover of employees. A variety of characteristics describe a healthy culture, including:

to



Acceptance and appreciation for diversity treatment of each employee as well as respect employee‘s contribution to the company pride and enthusiasm for the organization and



Regard for and fair for each



Employee the work performed Equal opportunity for each employee to realize their full potential within the company Strong communication with all employees regarding policies and company issues Strong company leaders with a strong sense of direction and purpose Ability to compete in industry innovation and customer service, as well as price Lower than average turnover rates (perpetuated by a healthy culture) Investment in learning, training, and employee knowledge

     

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Additionally, performance oriented cultures have been shown to possess statistically better financial growth. Such cultures possess high employee involvement, strong internal communications and an acceptance and encouragement of a healthy level of risk-taking in order to achieve innovation. Additionally, organizational cultures that explicitly emphasize factors related to the demands placed on them by industry technology and growth will be better performers in their industries.

According to Kotter and Heskett (1992), organizations with adaptive cultures perform much better than organizations with unadaptive cultures. An adaptive culture translates into organizational success; it is characterized by managers paying close attention to all of their constituencies, especially customers, initiating change when needed, and taking risks. An unadaptive culture can significantly reduce a firm's effectiveness, disabling the firm from pursuing all its competitive/operational options.

Charles Handy Charles Handy (1976), popularized Roger Harrison (1972) with linking organizational structure to organizational culture. The described four types of culture are: 1. Power culture: concentrates power among a small group or a central figure and its control is radiating from its center like a web. Power cultures need only a few rules and little bureaucracy but swift in decisions can ensue.

2. Role culture: authorities are delegated as such within a highly defined structure. These organizations form hierarchical bureaucracies, where power derives from the personal position and rarely from an expert power. Control is made by procedures (which are highly valued), strict roles descriptions and authority definitions. These organizations have consistent systems and are very predictable. This culture is often represented by a "Roman Building" having pillars. These pillars represent the functional departments.

3. Task culture: teams are formed to solve particular problems. Power is derived from the team with the expertise to execute against a task. This culture uses a small team approach, where people are highly skilled and specialized in their own area of expertise.

Additionally, these cultures often feature the multiple reporting lines seen in a matrix structure.

4. Person culture: formed where all individuals believe themselves superior to the organization. It can become difficult for such organizations to continue to operate, since the concept of an organization suggests that a group of like-minded individuals pursue organizational goals. However some professional partnerships operate well as person cultures, because each partner brings a particular expertise and clientele to the firm.

Kim Cameron and Robert Quinn Kim Cameron and Robert Quinn (1999) conducted research on organizational effectiveness and success. Based on the Competing Values Framework, they developed the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument that distinguishes four culture types.

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Competing values produce polarities like flexibility vs. stability and internal vs. external focus these two polarities were found to be most important in defining organizational success. The polarities construct a quadrant with four types of culture:    

Clan culture (internal focus and flexible) - A friendly workplace where leaders act like father figures.

Adhocracy culture (external focus and flexible) - A dynamic workplace with leaders that stimulate innovation.

Market culture (external focus and controlled) - A competitive workplace with leaders like hard drivers Hierarchy culture (internal focus and controlled) - A structured and formalized workplace where leaders act like coordinators.

Cameron and Quinn designated six characteristics of organizational culture that can be assessed with the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI).

Clan cultures are most strongly associated with positive employee attitudes and product and service quality. Market cultures are most strongly related with innovation and financial effectiveness criteria.

The primary belief in market cultures that clear goals and contingent rewards motivate employees to aggressively perform and meet stakeholders' expectations; a core belief in clan cultures is that the organization‘s trust in and commitment to employees facilitates open communication and employee involvement. These differing results suggest that it is important for executive leaders to consider the match between strategic initiatives and organizational culture when determining how to embed a culture that produces competitive advantage. By assessing the current organizational culture as well as the preferred situation, the gap and direction to change can be made visible as a first step to changing organizational culture.

Robert A. Cooke Robert A. Cooke defines culture as the behaviors that members believe are required to fit in and meet expectations within their organization. The Organizational Culture Inventory measures twelve behavioral norms that are grouped into three general types of cultures: 

Constructive cultures, in which members are encouraged to interact with people and approach tasks in ways that help them meet their higher-order satisfaction needs.

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 

Passive/defensive cultures, in which members believe they must interact with people in ways that will not threaten their own security.

Aggressive/defensive cultures, in which members are expected to approach tasks in forceful ways to protect their status and security.

Constructive Cultures In constructive cultures people are encouraged to be in communication with their co-workers, and work as teams, rather than only as individuals. In positions where people do a complex job, rather than something simple like a mechanic one, this culture is efficient.

1. Achievement: completing a task successfully, typically by effort, courage, or skill (pursue a standard of excellence) (explore alternatives before acting) - Based on the need to attain high-quality results on challenging projects, the belief that outcomes are linked to one's effort rather than chance and the tendency to personally set challenging yet realistic goals. People high in this style think ahead and plan, explore alternatives before acting and learn from their mistakes.

2. Self-actualizing: realization or fulfillment of one's talents and potentialities - considered as a drive or need present in everyone (think in unique and independent ways) (do even simple tasks well) - Based on needs for personal growth, self-fulfillment and the realisation of one's potential. People with this style demonstrate a strong desire to learn and experience things, creative yet realistic thinking and a balanced concern for people and tasks.

3. Humanistic-encouraging: help others to grow and develop (resolve conflicts constructively) - Reflects an interest in the growth and development of people, a high positive regard for them and sensitivity to their needs. People high in this style devote energy to coaching and counselling others, are thoughtful and considerate and provide people with support and encouragement.

4. Affiliative: treat people as more valuable than things (cooperate with others) - Reflects an interest in developing and sustaining pleasant relationships. People high in this style share their thoughts and feelings, are friendly and cooperative and make others feel a part of things.

Organizations with constructive cultures encourage members to work to their full potential, resulting in high levels of motivation, satisfaction, teamwork, service quality, and sales growth.

Constructive norms are evident in environments where quality is valued over quantity, creativity is valued over conformity, cooperation is believed to lead to better results than competition, and effectiveness is judged at the system level rather than the component level. These types of cultural norms are consistent with (and supportive of) the objectives behind empowerment, total quality management, transformational leadership, continuous improvement, re-engineering, and learning organizations.

Passive/Defensive Cultures Norms that reflect expectations for members to interact with people in ways that will not threaten their own security are in the Passive/Defensive Cluster.

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The four Passive/Defensive cultural norms are:    

Approval Conventional Dependent Avoidance

In organizations with Passive/Defensive cultures, members feel pressured to think and behave in ways that are inconsistent with the way they believe they should in order to be effective. People are expected to please others (particularly superiors) and avoid interpersonal conflict. Rules, procedures, and orders are more important than personal beliefs, ideas, and judgment.

Passive/Defensive cultures experience a lot of unresolved conflict and turnover, and organizational members report lower levels of motivation and satisfaction.

Aggressive/Defensive Cultures This style is characterized with more emphasis on task than people. Because of the very nature of this style, people tend to focus on their own individual needs at the expense of the success of the group. The aggressive/defensive style is very stressful, and people using this style tend to make decisions based on status as opposed to expertise.

1. Oppositional - This cultural norm is based on the idea that a need for security that takes the form of being very critical and cynical at times. People who use this style are more likely to question others work; however, asking those tough question often leads to a better product. Nonetheless, those who use this style may be overly-critical toward others, using irrelevant or trivial flaws to put others down.

2. Power - This cultural norm is based on the idea that there is a need for prestige and influence. Those who use this style often equate their own self-worth with controlling others. Those who use this style have a tendency to dictate others opposing to guiding others‘ actions.

3. Competitive - This cultural norm is based on the idea of a need to protect one‘s status.

Those who use this style protect their own status by comparing themselves to other individuals and outperforming them. Those who use this style are seekers of appraisal and recognition from others.

4. Perfectionistic - This cultural norm is based on the need to attain flawless results. Those who often use this style equate their self-worth with the attainment of extremely high standards. Those who often use this style are always focused on details and place excessive demands on themselves and others.

Organizations with aggressive/defensive cultures encourage or require members to appear competent, controlled, and superior. Members who seek assistance, admit shortcomings, or concede their position are viewed as incompetent or weak. These organizations emphasize finding errors, weeding out "mistakes" and encouraging members to compete against each other Page 66 of 120

rather than competitors. The short-term gains associated with these strategies are often at the expense of long-term growth.

Entrepreneurial Stephen McGuire (2003) defined and validated a model of organizational culture that predicts revenue from new sources. An Entrepreneurial Organizational Culture (EOC) is a system of shared values, beliefs and norms of members of an organization, including valuing creativity and tolerance of creative people, believing that innovating and seizing market opportunities are appropriate behaviors to deal with problems of survival and prosperity, environmental uncertainty, and competitors' threats, and expecting organizational members to behave accordingly.

Elements        

People and empowerment focused Value creation through innovation and change Attention to the basics Hands-on management Doing the right thing Freedom to grow and to fail Commitment and personal responsibility Emphasis on the future

Bullying Culture Bullying is seen to be prevalent in organisations where employees and managers feel that they have the support, or at least implicitly the blessing, of senior managers to carry on their abusive and bullying behaviour. Furthermore, new managers will quickly come to view this form of behaviour as acceptable and normal if they see others get away with it and are even rewarded for it.

When bullying happens at the highest levels, the effects may be far reaching. That people may be bullied irrespective of their organisational status or rank, including senior managers, indicates the possibility of a negative domino effect, where bullying may be cascaded downwards as the targeted supervisors might offload their own aggression on their subordinates. In such situations, a bullying scenario in the boardroom may actually threaten the productivity of the entire organisation.

Culture of Fear Ashforth discussed potentially destructive sides of leadership and identified what he referred to as petty tyrants, i.e. leaders who exercise a tyrannical style of management, resulting in a climate of fear in the workplace. Partial or intermittent negative reinforcement can create an effective climate of fear and doubt. When employees get the sense that bullies ―get away with it‖, a

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climate of fear may be the result. Several studies have confirmed a relationship between bullying, on the one hand, and an autocratic leadership and an authoritarian way of settling conflicts or dealing with disagreements, on the other. An authoritarian style of leadership may create a climate of fear, where there is little or no room for dialogue and where complaining may be considered futile.

In a study of public-sector union members, approximately one in five workers reported having considered leaving the workplace as a result of witnessing bullying taking place. Rayner explained these figures by pointing to the presence of a climate of fear in which employees considered reporting to be unsafe, where bullies had ―got away with it‖ previously despite management knowing of the presence of bullying.

Tribal Culture David Logan and coauthors have proposed in their book Tribal Leadership that organizational cultures change in stages, based on an analysis of human groups and tribal cultures. They identify five basic stages: 1. Life sucks (a subsystem severed from other functional systems like tribes, gangs and prison—2 percent of population); 2. My life sucks (I am stuck in the Dumb Motor Vehicle line and can't believe I have to spend my time in this lost triangle of ineffectiveness—25 percent of population); Page 68 of 120

3. I'm great (and you're not, I am detached from you and will dominate you regardless of your intent—48 percent of population); 4. We are great, but other groups suck (citing Zappo's and an attitude of unification around more than individual competence—22 percent of population) and 5. Life is great (citing Desmond Tutu's hearing on truth and values as the basis of reconciliation—3 percent of population).

This model of organizational culture provides a map and context for leading an organization through the five stages.

Personal Culture Organizational culture is taught to the person as culture is taught by his/her parents thus changing and modeling his/her personal culture. Indeed employees and people applying for a job are advised to match their "personality to a company‘s culture" and fit to it. Some researchers even suggested and have made case studies research on personality changing.

National Culture Corporate culture is used to control, coordinate, and integrate of company subsidiaries. However differences in national cultures exist contributing to differences in the views on the management.

Differences between national cultures are deep rooted values of the respective cultures, and these cultural values can shape how people expect companies to be run, and how relationships between leaders and followers should be resulting to differences between the employer and the employee on expectations. (Geert Hofstede, 1991) Perhaps equally foundational; observing the vast differences in national copyright (and taxation, etc.) laws suggests deep rooted differing cultural attitudes and assumptions on property rights and sometimes; the desired root function, place, or purpose of corporations relative to the population.

Multiplicity Xibao Zhang (2009) carried out an empirical study of culture emergence in the Sino-Western international cross-cultural management (SW-ICCM) context in China. Field data were collected by interviewing Western expatriates and Chinese professionals working in this context, supplemented by non-participant observation and documentary data. The data were then analyzed in grounded fashion to formulate theme-based substantive theories and a formal theory.

The major finding of this study is that human cognition contains three components, or three broad types of "cultural rules of behavior", namely, Values, Expectations, and Ad Hoc Rules, each of which has a mutually conditioning relationship with behavior. The three cognitive components are different in terms of the scope and duration of their mutual shaping with behavior. Values are universal and enduring rules of behavior; Expectations, on the other hand, are context-specific behavioral rules; while Ad Hoc Rules are improvised rules of behavior that the human mind devises contingent upon a particular occasion. Furthermore, they need not be consistent, and frequently are not, among themselves. Metaphorically, they can be compared to a

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multi-carriage train, which allows for the relative lateral movements by individual carriages so as to accommodate bumps and turns in the tracks. In fact, they provide a "shock-absorber mechanism", so to speak, which enables individuals in SW-ICCM contexts to cope with conflicts in cultural practices and values, and to accommodate and adapt themselves to cultural contexts where people from different national cultural backgrounds work together over extended time. It also provides a powerful framework which explains how interactions by individuals in SW-ICCM contexts give rise to emerging hybrid cultural practices characterized by both stability and change.

One major theoretical contribution of this "multi-carriage train" perspective is its allowance for the existence of inconsistencies among the three cognitive components in their mutual conditioning with behavior. This internal inconsistency view is in stark contrast to the traditional internal consistency assumption explicitly or tacitly held by many culture scholars. The other major theoretical contribution, which follows logically from the first one, is to view culture as an overarching entity which is made of a multiplicity of Values, Expectations, and Ad Hoc Rules.

This notion of one (multiplicity) culture to an organization leads to the classification of culture along its path of emergence into nascent, adolescent, and mature types, each of which is distinct in terms of the pattern of the three cognitive components and behavior.

Impacts Research suggests that numerous outcomes have been associated either directly or indirectly with organizational culture. A healthy and robust organizational culture may provide various benefits, including the following:     

Competitive edge derived from innovation and customer service Consistent, efficient employee performance Team cohesiveness High employee morale Strong company alignment towards goal achievement

Although little empirical research exists to support the link between organizational culture and organizational performance, there is little doubt among experts that this relationship exists.

Organizational culture can be a factor in the survival or failure of an organization - although this is difficult to prove considering the necessary longitudinal analyses are hardly feasible. The Page 70 of 120

sustained superior performance of firms like IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Procter & Gamble, and McDonald's may be, at least partly, a reflection of their organizational cultures.

A 2003 Harvard Business School study reported that culture has a significant impact on an organization‘s long-term economic performance. The study examined the management practices at 160 organizations over ten years and found that culture can enhance performance or prove detrimental to performance. Organizations with strong performance-oriented cultures witnessed far better financial growth. Additionally, a 2002 Corporate Leadership Council study found that cultural traits such as risk taking, internal communications, and flexibility are some of the most important drivers of performance, and may impact individual performance. Furthermore, innovativeness, productivity through people, and the other cultural factors cited by Peters and Waterman (1982) also have positive economic consequences.

Denison, Haaland, and Goelzer (2004) found that culture contributes to the success of the organization, but not all dimensions contribute the same. It was found that the impacts of these dimensions differ by global regions, which suggests that organizational culture is impacted by national culture. Additionally, Clarke (2006) found that a safety climate is related to an organization‘s safety record.

Organizational culture is reflected in the way people perform tasks, set objectives, and administer the necessary resources to achieve objectives. Culture affects the way individuals make decisions, feel, and act in response to the opportunities and threats affecting the organization.

Adkins and Caldwell (2004) found that job satisfaction was positively associated with the degree to which employees fit into both the overall culture and subculture in which they worked. A perceived mismatch of the organization‘s culture and what employees felt the culture should be is related to a number of negative consequences including lower job satisfaction, higher job strain, general stress, and turnover intent.

It has been proposed that organizational culture may impact the level of employee creativity, the strength of employee motivation, and the reporting of unethical behavior, but more research is needed to support these conclusions.

Organizational culture also has an impact on recruitment and retention. Individuals tend to be attracted to and remain engaged in organizations that they perceive to be compatible.

Additionally, high turnover may be a mediating factor in the relationship between culture and organizational performance. Deteriorating company performance and an unhealthy work environment are signs of an overdue cultural assessment.

Change When an organization does not possess a healthy culture or requires some kind of organizational culture change, the change process can be daunting. One major reason why such change is difficult is that organizational cultures, and the organizational structures in which they are embedded, often reflect the "imprint" of earlier periods in a persistent way and exhibit Page 71 of 120

remarkable levels of inertia. Culture change may be necessary to reduce employee turnover, influence employee behavior, make improvements to the company, refocus the company objectives and/or rescale the organization, provide better customer service, and/or achieve specific company goals and results. Culture change is impacted by a number of elements, including the external environment and industry competitors, change in industry standards, technology changes, the size and nature of the workforce, and the organization‘s history and management.

There are a number of methodologies specifically dedicated to organizational culture change such as Peter Senge‘s Fifth Discipline. These are also a variety of psychological approaches that have been developed into a system for specific outcomes such as the Fifth Discipline’s "learning organization" or Directive Communication’s "corporate culture evolution." Ideas and strategies, on the other hand, seem to vary according to particular influences that affect culture.

Burman and Evans (2008) argue that it is 'leadership' that affects culture rather than

'management', and describe the difference. When one wants to change an aspect of the culture of an organization one has to keep in consideration that this is a long term project. Corporate culture is something that is very hard to change and employees need time to get used to the new way of organizing. For companies with a very strong and specific culture it will be even harder to change.

Prior to a cultural change initiative, a needs assessment is needed to identify and understand the current organizational culture. This can be done through employee surveys, interviews, focus groups, observation, customer surveys where appropriate, and other internal research, to further identify areas that require change. The company must then assess and clearly identify the new, desired culture, and then design a change process.

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Cummings & Worley (2004, p. 491 – 492) give the following six guidelines for cultural change, these changes are in line with the eight distinct stages mentioned by Kotter (1995, p. 2): 1. Formulate a clear strategic vision (stage 1, 2, and 3). In order to make a cultural change effective a clear vision of the firm‘s new strategy, shared values and behaviors is needed.

This vision provides the intention and direction for the culture change (Cummings & Worley, 2004, p. 490).

2. Display top-management commitment (stage 4). It is very important to keep in mind that culture change must be managed from the top of the organization, as willingness to change of the senior management is an important indicator (Cummings & Worley, 2004, page 490). The top of the organization should be very much in favor of the change in order to actually implement the change in the rest of the organization. De Caluwé & Vermaak (2004, p 9) provide a framework with five different ways of thinking about change.

3. Model culture change at the highest level (stage 5). In order to show that the management team is in favor of the change, the change has to be notable at first at this level. The behavior of the management needs to symbolize the kinds of values and behaviors that should be realized in the rest of the company. It is important that the management shows the strengths of the current culture as well, it must be made clear that the current organizational does not need radical changes, but just a few adjustments. (See for more: Deal & Kennedy, 1982; Sathe, 1983; Schall; 1983; Weick, 1985; DiTomaso, 1987). This process may also include creating committee, employee task forces, value managers, or similar. Change agents are key in the process and key communicators of the new values.

They should possess courage, flexibility, excellent interpersonal skills, knowledge of the company, and patience. As McCune (May 1999) puts it, these individual should be catalysts, not dictators.

4. Modify the organization to support organizational change. The fourth step is to modify the organization to support organizational change. This includes identifying what current systems, policies, procedures and rules need to be changed in order to align with the new values and desired culture. This may include a change to accountability systems, compensation, benefits and reward structures, and recruitment and retention programs to better align with the new values and to send a clear message to employees that the old system and culture are in the past.

5. Select and socialize newcomers and terminate deviants (stage 7 & 8 of Kotter, 1995, p. 2). A way to implement a culture is to connect it to organizational membership, people can be selected and terminate in terms of their fit with the new culture (Cummings & Worley, 2004, p. 491). Encouraging employee motivation and loyalty to the company is key and will also result in a healthy culture. The company and change managers should be able to articulate the connections between the desired behavior and how it will impact and improve the company‘s success, to further encourage buy-in in the change process.

Training should be provided to all employees to understand the new processes, expectations and systems.

6. Develop ethical and legal sensitivity. Changes in culture can lead to tensions between organizational and individual interests, which can result in ethical and legal problems for practitioners. This is particularly relevant for changes in employee integrity, control, equitable treatment and job security (Cummings & Worley, 2004, p. 491). It is also

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beneficial, as part of the change process, to include an evaluation process, conducted periodically to monitor the change progress and identify areas that need further development. This step will also identify obstacles of change and resistant employees and to acknowledge and reward employee improvement, which will also encourage continued change and evolvement. It may also be helpful and necessary to incorporate new change managers to refresh the process. Outside consultants may also be useful in facilitating the change process and providing employee training. Change of culture in the organizations is very important and inevitable. Culture innovations is bound to be because it entails introducing something new and substantially different from what prevails in existing cultures. Cultural innovation is bound to be more difficult than cultural maintenance.

People often resist changes hence it is the duty of the management to convince people that likely gain will outweigh the losses. Besides institutionalization, deification is another process that tends to occur in strongly developed organizational cultures. The organization itself may come to be regarded as precious in itself, as a source of pride, and in some sense unique. Organizational members begin to feel a strong bond with it that transcends material returns given by the organization, and they begin to identify with it.

The organization turns into a sort of clan.

Mergers and Cultural Leadership One of the biggest obstacles in the way of the merging of two organizations is organizational culture. Each organization has its own unique culture and most often, when brought together, these cultures clash. When mergers fail employees point to issues such as identity, communication problems, human resources problems, ego clashes, and inter-group conflicts, which all fall under the category of "cultural differences".

One way to combat such difficulties is through cultural leadership.

Organizational leaders must also be cultural leaders and help facilitate the change from the two old cultures into the one new culture. This is done through cultural innovation followed by cultural maintenance.  

Cultural innovation includes Cultural maintenance includes: o Integrating the new culture: reconciling the differences between the old cultures and the new one o Embodying the new culture: Establishing, affirming, and keeping the new culture

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Corporate Subcultures Corporate culture is the total sum of the values, customs, traditions, and meanings that make a company unique. Corporate culture is often called "the character of an organization", since it embodies the vision of the company's founders. The values of a corporate culture influence the ethical standards within a corporation, as well as managerial behavior.

Senior management may try to determine a corporate culture. They may wish to impose corporate values and standards of behavior that specifically reflect the objectives of the organization. In addition, there will also be an extant internal culture within the workforce.

Work-groups within the organization have their own behavioral quirks and interactions which, to an extent, affect the whole system. Roger Harrison's four-culture typology, and adapted by Charles Handy, suggests that unlike organizational culture, corporate culture can be 'imported'.

For example, computer technicians will have expertise, language and behaviors gained independently of the organization, but their presence can influence the culture of the organization as a whole.

Legal Aspects Corporate culture can legally be found to be a cause of injuries and a reason for fining companies in the US, e.g., when the US Department of Labor Mine Safety and Health Administration levied a fine of more than 10.8 million US dollars on Performance Coal Co. following the Upper Big Branch Mine disaster in April 2010. This was the largest fine in the history of this U.S. government agency.

Critical Views Criticism of the usage of the term by managers began already in its emergence in the early 80s.

Most of the criticism comes from the writers in critical management studies who for example express skepticism about the functionalist and unitarist views about culture that are put forward by mainstream management writers. They stress the ways in which these cultural assumptions can stifle dissent management and reproduce propaganda and ideology. They suggest that organizations do not have a single culture and cultural engineering may not reflect the interests of all stakeholders within an organization.

Parker (2000) has suggested that many of the assumptions of those putting forward theories of organizational culture are not new. They reflect a long-standing tension between cultural and structural (or informal and formal) versions of what organizations are. Further, it is reasonable to suggest that complex organizations might have many cultures, and that such sub-cultures might overlap and contradict each other. The neat typologies of cultural forms found in textbooks rarely acknowledge such complexities, or the various economic contradictions that exist in capitalist organizations.

Among the strongest and widely recognized writers on corporate culture with a long list of articles on leadership, culture, gender and their intersection is Linda Smircich, as a part of the of Page 75 of 120

critical management studies, she criticises theories that attempt to categorize or 'pigeonhole' organizational culture. She uses the metaphor of a plant root to represent culture, describing that it drives organizations rather than vice versa. Organizations are the product of organizational culture, we are unaware of how it shapes behavior and interaction (also recognized through Scheins (2002) underlying assumptions) and so how can we categorize it and define what it is?

Organizational Diagnostics In the field"Corporate diagnosis is a process that involves the three steps of publicly entering a human system, collecting valid data about experiences, and feeding back to the system toward promoting corporate performance(Zarei et al.(2014))".

The effective diagnosis of organizational culture, and structural and operational strengths and weaknesses are fundamental to any successful organizational development intervention. As Beckhard said in the preface to his seminal work ... in our rapidly changing environment, new organization forms must be developed; more effective goal-setting and planning processes must be learned, and practiced teams of independent people must spend real time improving their methods of working, decisionmaking and communicating. Competing or conflicting groups must move towards a collaborative way of work. In order for these changes to occur and be maintained, a planned, managed change effort is necessary - a program of organizational development.

This was written in 1969 and while much has been learnt it is just as true today.

Since the beginnings of organizational development as a profession, diagnosis has moved from the purely behavioral towards a strategic and holistic business diagnostic approach, and from looking at human interventions in isolation to exploring the interactions of people in the context in which they operate. As organizations are more collaborative in nature, the traditional silo approach to diagnostics is becoming increasingly rare. Organizational development and in particular the diagnostic phase of activities is spreading from the occupational psychologists towards mainstream business. This is important for OD practitioners as the role is increasingly holistic

The Organizational Diagnosis Models Until now, the following models are introduced for organizational diagnosis: 1. Force Field Analysis (1951) 2. Leavitt‘s model (1965) 3. Likert system analysis (1967) 4. Open system theory (1966) 5. Weisbord‘s six-box model (1976) 6. Congruence model for organization Page 76 of 120

analysis (1977) 7. Mckinsey 7s framework (1981-1982) 8. Tichy‘s technical political cultural (TPC) framework (1983) 9. High-performance programming (1984) 10. Diagnosing individual and group behavior (1987) 11. Burke–Litwin model of organizational performance and change (1992) 12. Falletta‘s organizational intelligence model (2008) 13. Semantic Network Analysis (2014)(by Zarei, Chaghouee and Ghapanchi)

The Consulting Process The organizational Diagnostic phase is often integrated within an overall OD process, commonly called 'a consulting process'. An example of such a process is: Entry --> Diagnosis --> Action Planning --> Implementation --> Termination As the second phase in the consulting cycle, it is also the first fully operational phase of the consulting process or cycle. The purpose of the diagnosis is to examine the problem faced by the organization in detail, to identify factors and forces that are causing the problem and to prepare the collected information to decide how to implement possible solutions to the identified problems.

The diagnosis of the problem is a separate phase from the solutions themselves.

Organizational Re-Engineering [Organizational] Process Re-Engineering is a business management strategy, originally pioneered in the early 1990s, focusing on the analysis and design of workflows and business processes within an organization. BPR aimed to help organizations fundamentally rethink how they do their work in order to dramatically improve customer service, cut operational costs, and become world-class competitors. In the mid-1990s, as many as 60% of the Fortune 500 companies claimed to either have initiated reengineering efforts, or to have plans to do so.

BPR seeks to help companies radically restructure their organizations by focusing on the groundup design of their business processes. According to Davenport (1990) a business process is a set of logically related tasks performed to achieve a defined business outcome. Re-engineering emphasized a holistic focus on business objectives and how processes related to them, encouraging full-scale recreation of processes rather than iterative optimization of subprocesses.

Business process re-engineering is also known as business process redesign, business transformation, or business process change management.

Business Process Reengineering (BPR) is the practice of rethinking and redesigning the way work is done to better support an organization's mission and reduce costs. Reengineering starts with a high-level assessment of the organization's mission, strategic goals, and customer needs.

Basic questions are asked, such as "Does our mission need to be redefined? Are our strategic goals aligned with our mission? Who are our customers?" An organization may find that it is operating on questionable assumptions, particularly in terms of the wants and needs of its

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customers. Only after the organization rethinks what it should be doing, does it go on to decide how best to do it.

Within the framework of this basic assessment of mission and goals, re-engineering focuses on the organization's business processes—the steps and procedures that govern how resources are used to create products and services that meet the needs of particular customers or markets. As a structured ordering of work steps across time and place, a business process can be decomposed into specific activities, measured, modeled, and improved. It can also be completely redesigned or eliminated altogether. Re-engineering identifies, analyzes, and re-designs an organization's core business processes with the aim of achieving dramatic improvements in critical performance measures, such as cost, quality, service, and speed.

Reengineering recognizes that an organization's business processes are usually fragmented into subprocesses and tasks that are carried out by several specialized functional areas within the organization. Often, no one is responsible for the overall performance of the entire process. Re-engineering maintains that optimizing the performance of subprocesses can result in some benefits, but cannot yield dramatic improvements if the process itself is fundamentally inefficient and outmoded. For that reason, re-engineering focuses on re-designing the process as a whole in order to achieve the greatest possible benefits to the organization and their customers. This drive for realizing dramatic improvements by fundamentally re-thinking how the organization's work should be done distinguishes re-engineering from process improvement efforts that focus on functional or incremental improvement.

History Business process re-engineering (BPR) began as a private sector technique to help organizations fundamentally rethink how they do their work in order to dramatically improve customer service, cut operational costs, and become world-class competitors. A key stimulus for re-engineering has been the continuing development and deployment of sophisticated information systems and networks. Leading organizations are becoming bolder in using this technology to support innovative business processes, rather than refining current ways of doing work.

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Reengineering Work: Don't Automate, Obliterate, 1990 In 1990, Michael Hammer, a former professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), published the article "Reengineering Work: Don't Automate, Obliterate" in the Harvard Business Review, in which he claimed that the major challenge for managers is to obliterate forms of work that do not add value, rather than using technology for automating it.

This statement implicitly accused managers of having focused on the wrong issues, namely that technology in general, and more specifically information technology, has been used primarily for automating existing processes rather than using it as an enabler for making non-value adding work obsolete.

Hammer's claim was simple: Most of the work being done does not add any value for customers, and this work should be removed, not accelerated through automation. Instead, companies should reconsider their inability to satisfy customer needs, and their insufficient cost structure.

Even well established management thinkers, such as Peter Drucker and Tom Peters, were accepting and advocating BPR as a new tool for (re-)achieving success in a dynamic world.

During the following years, a fast-growing number of publications, books as well as journal articles, were dedicated to BPR, and many consulting firms embarked on this trend and developed BPR methods. However, the critics were fast to claim that BPR was a way to dehumanize the work place, increase managerial control, and to justify downsizing, i.e. major reductions of the work force, and a rebirth of Taylorism under a different label.

Despite this critique, reengineering was adopted at an accelerating pace and by 1993, as many as 60% of the Fortune 500 companies claimed to either have initiated reengineering efforts, or to have plans to do so. This trend was fueled by the fast adoption of BPR by the consulting industry, but also by the study Made in America, conducted by MIT, that showed how companies in many US industries had lagged behind their foreign counterparts in terms of competitiveness, time-to-market and productivity.

Development after 1995 With the publication of critiques in 1995 and 1996 by some of the early BPR proponents, coupled with abuses and misuses of the concept by others, the reengineering fervor in the U.S. began to wane. Since then, considering business processes as a starting point for business analysis and redesign has become a widely accepted approach and is a standard part of the change methodology portfolio, but is typically performed in a less radical way than originally proposed.

More recently, the concept of Business Process Management (BPM) has gained major attention in the corporate world and can be considered as a successor to the BPR wave of the 1990s, as it is evenly driven by a striving for process efficiency supported by information technology.

Equivalently to the critique brought forward against BPR, BPM is now accused of focusing on technology and disregarding the people aspects of change.

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Business Process Re-Engineering Topics The most notable definitions of reengineering are: 



"... the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical contemporary modern measures of performance, such as cost, quality, service, and speed." "encompasses the envisioning of new work strategies, the actual process design activity, and the implementation of the change in all its complex technological, human, and organizational dimensions."

BPR is different from other approaches to organization development (OD), especially the continuous improvement or TQM movement, by virtue of its aim for fundamental and radical change rather than iterative improvement. In order to achieve the major improvements BPR is seeking for, the change of structural organizational variables, and other ways of managing and performing work is often considered as being insufficient. For being able to reap the achievable benefits fully, the use of information technology (IT) is conceived as a major contributing factor.

While IT traditionally has been used for supporting the existing business functions, i.e. it was used for increasing organizational efficiency, it now plays a role as enabler of new organizational forms, and patterns of collaboration within and between organizations.

BPR derives its existence from different disciplines, and four major areas can be identified as being subjected to change in BPR - organization, technology, strategy, and people - where a process view is used as common framework for considering these dimensions.

Business strategy is the primary driver of BPR initiatives and the other dimensions are governed by strategy's encompassing role. The organization dimension reflects the structural elements of the company, such as hierarchical levels, the composition of organizational units, and the distribution of work between them. Technology is concerned with the use of computer systems and other forms of communication technology in the business. In BPR, information technology is generally considered as playing a role as enabler of new forms of organizing and collaborating, rather than supporting existing business functions. The people / human resources dimension deals with aspects such as education, training, motivation and reward systems. The concept of business processes - interrelated activities aiming at creating a value added output to a customer is the basic underlying idea of BPR. These processes are characterized by a number of attributes: Process ownership, customer focus, value adding, and cross-functionality.

The Role of Information Technology Information technology (IT) has historically played an important role in the reengineering concept. It is considered by some as a major enabler for new forms of working and collaborating within an organization and across organizational borders.

BPR literature identified several so called disruptive technologies that were supposed to challenge traditional wisdom about how work should be performed.

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       

Shared databases, making information available at many places Expert systems, allowing generalists to perform specialist tasks Telecommunication networks, allowing organizations to be centralized and decentralized at the same time Decision-support tools, allowing decision-making to be a part of everybody's job Wireless data communication and portable computers, allowing field personnel to work office independent Interactive videodisk, to get in immediate contact with potential buyers Automatic identification and tracking, allowing things to tell where they are, instead of requiring to be found High performance computing, allowing on-the-fly planning and revisioning

In the mid-1990s, especially workflow management systems were considered as a significant contributor to improved process efficiency. Also ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) vendors, such as SAP, JD Edwards, Oracle, PeopleSoft, positioned their solutions as vehicles for business process redesign and improvement.

Research and Methodology Although the labels and steps differ slightly, the early methodologies that were rooted in ITcentric BPR solutions share many of the same basic principles and elements. The following outline is one such model, based on the PRLC (Process Reengineering Life Cycle) approach developed by Guha. Simplified schematic outline of using a business process approach, exemplified for pharmaceutical R&D 1. Structural organization with functional units 2. Introduction of New Product Development as cross-functional process 3. Re-structuring and streamlining activities, removal of non-value adding tasks Benefiting from lessons learned from the early adopters, some BPR practitioners advocated a change in emphasis to a customer-centric, as opposed to an IT-centric, methodology. One such methodology, that also incorporated a Risk and Impact Assessment to account for the impact that BPR can have on jobs and operations, was described by Lon Roberts (1994). Roberts also stressed the use of change management tools to proactively address resistance to change—a factor linked to the demise of many reengineering initiatives that looked good on the drawing board.

Some items to use on a process analysis checklist are: Reduce handoffs, Centralize data, Reduce delays, Free resources faster, Combine similar activities. Also within the management consulting industry, a significant number of methodological approaches have been developed.

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BPR Success & Failure Factors BPR projects and efforts have revealed some interesting findings for both academics and practitioners. Some BPR researchers have focused on key factors in the BPR process that enabled a successful outcome. Many lessons were learned and many elements were identified as essential to the success of a BPR activity. Some important BPR success factors, which will be discussed in further details later, include, but are not limited to the following: 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

BPR team composition.

Business needs analysis.

Adequate IT infrastructure.

Effective change management.

Ongoing continuous improvement

Generally, BPR does not only mean change, but rather dramatic change. The constituents of this drastic change include the overhaul of organizational structures, management systems, employee responsibilities and performance measurements, incentive systems, skills development, and the use of IT. BPR can potentially impact every aspect of how business is conducted today. Change on this scale can cause results ranging from enviable success to complete failure. In spite of the depth of change involved in undertaking BPR efforts, a recent survey showed that some 88 percent of CIOs were satisfied with the end result of BPR efforts. Successful BPR can result in enormous reductions in cost or cycle time. It can also potentially create substantial improvements in business operations, quality, customer service, or other business objectives. Reengineering can help an aggressive company to stay on top, or transform an organization on the verge of bankruptcy into an effective competitor. The successes have spawned international interest, and major reengineering efforts are being conducted around the world.

On the other hand, BPR projects can fail to meet the inherently high expectations of reengineering. In 1998, it was reported that only 30 percent of reengineering projects were regarded as successful. The earlier promise of BPR has not been fulfilled as some organizations have put forth extensive BPR efforts only to achieve marginal, or even negligible, benefits. Other organizations have succeeded only in destroying the morale and momentum built up over their lifetime. These failures indicate that reengineering involves a great deal of risk besides remarkable rewards.

There are many reasons for sub-optimal business processes which include: 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

One department may be optimized at the expense of another Lack of time to focus on improving business process Lack of recognition of the extent of the problem Lack of training People involved use the best tool they have at their disposal which is usually Excel to fix problems 6. Inadequate infrastructure 7. Overly bureaucratic processes 8. Lack of motivation Page 82 of 120

Many unsuccessful BPR attempts may have been due to the confusion surrounding BPR, and how it should be performed. Organizations were well aware that changes needed to be made, but did not know which areas to change or how to change them. As a result, process reengineering is a management concept that has been formed by trial and error or, in other words, practical experience. As more and more businesses reengineer their processes, knowledge of what caused the successes or failures is becoming apparent. To reap lasting benefits, companies must be willing to examine how strategy and reengineering complement each other by learning to quantify strategy in terms of cost, milestones, and timetables, by accepting ownership of the strategy throughout the organization, by assessing the organization‘s current capabilities and process realistically, and by linking strategy to the budgeting process. Otherwise, BPR is only a short-term efficiency exercise.

Organization-Wide Commitment Major changes to business processes have a direct impact on processes, technology, job roles, and workplace culture. Significant changes to even one of those areas require resources, money, and leadership. Changing them simultaneously is an extraordinary task. Like any large and complex undertaking, implementing reengineering requires the talents and energies of a broad spectrum of experts. Since BPR can involve multiple areas within the organization, it is important to get support from all affected departments. Through the involvement of selected department members, the organization can gain valuable input before a process is implemented; a step which promotes both the cooperation and the vital acceptance of the reengineered process by all segments of the organization.

Getting enterprise wide commitment involves the following: top management sponsorship, bottom-up buy-in from process users, dedicated BPR team, and budget allocation for the total solution with measures to demonstrate value. Before any BPR project can be implemented successfully, there must be a commitment to the project by the management of the organization, and strong leadership must be provided. Reengineering efforts can by no means be exercised without a company-wide commitment to the goals. However, top management commitment is imperative for success. Top management must recognize the need for change, develop a complete understanding of what BPR is, and plan how to achieve it.

Leadership has to be effective, strong, visible, and creative in thinking and understanding in order to provide a clear vision. Convincing every affected group within the organization of the need for BPR is a key step in successfully implementing a process. By informing all affected groups at every stage, and emphasizing the positive end results of the reengineering process, it is possible to minimize resistance to change and increase the odds for success. The ultimate success of BPR depends on the strong, consistent, and continuous involvement of all departmental levels within the organization. It also depends on the people who do it and how well they can be motivated to be creative and to apply their detailed knowledge to the redesign of business processes.

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BPR Team Composition Once organization-wide commitment has been secured from all departments involved in the reengineering effort and at different levels, the critical step of selecting a BPR team must be taken. This team will form the nucleus of the BPR effort, make key decisions and recommendations, and help communicate the details and benefits of the BPR program to the entire organization. The determinants of an effective BPR team may be summarized as follows:       

competency of the members of the team, their motivation, their credibility within the organization and their creativity, team empowerment, training of members in process mapping and brainstorming techniques, effective team leadership, proper organization of the team, complementary skills among team members, adequate size, interchangeable accountability, clarity of work approach, and specificity of goals.

The most effective BPR teams include active representatives from the following work groups: top management, business area responsible for the process being addressed, technology groups, finance, and members of all ultimate process users‘ groups. Team members who are selected from each work group within the organization will have an impact on the outcome of the reengineered process according to their desired requirements. The BPR team should be mixed in depth and knowledge. For example, it may include members with the following characteristics:    

Members who do not know the process at all.

Members who know the process inside-out.

Customers, if possible.

Members representing impacted departments.

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 

One or two members of the best, brightest, passionate, and committed technology experts.

Members from outside of the organization

Moreover, Covert (1997) recommends that in order to have an effective BPR team, it must be kept under ten players. If the organization fails to keep the team at a manageable size, the entire process will be much more difficult to execute efficiently and effectively. The efforts of the team must be focused on identifying breakthrough opportunities and designing new work steps or processes that will create quantum gains and competitive advantage.

Organizational Needs Analysis Another important factor in the success of any BPR effort is performing a thorough business needs analysis. Too often, BPR teams jump directly into the technology without first assessing the current processes of the organization and determining what exactly needs reengineering. In this analysis phase, a series of sessions should be held with process owners and stakeholders, regarding the need and strategy for BPR. These sessions build a consensus as to the vision of the ideal business process. They help identify essential goals for BPR within each department and then collectively define objectives for how the project will impact each work group or department on individual basis and the business organization as a whole. The idea of these sessions is to conceptualize the ideal business process for the organization and build a business process model. Those items that seem unnecessary or unrealistic may be eliminated or modified later on in the diagnosing stage of the BPR project. It is important to acknowledge and evaluate all ideas in order to make all participants feel that they are a part of this important and crucial process. Results of these meetings will help formulate the basic plan for the project.

This plan includes the following:   

identifying specific problem areas, solidifying particular goals, and defining business objectives.

The business needs analysis contributes tremendously to the re-engineering effort by helping the BPR team to prioritize and determine where it should focus its improvements efforts.

The business needs analysis also helps in relating the BPR project goals back to key business objectives and the overall strategic direction for the organization. This linkage should show the thread from the top to the bottom of the organization, so each person can easily connect the overall business direction with the re-engineering effort. This alignment must be demonstrated from the perspective of financial performance, customer service, associate value, and the vision for the organization. Developing a business vision and process objectives relies, on the one hand, on a clear understanding of organizational strengths, weaknesses, and market structure, and on the other, on awareness and knowledge about innovative activities undertaken by competitors and other organizations.

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BPR projects that are not in alignment with the organization‘s strategic direction can be counterproductive. There is always a possibility that an organization may make significant investments in an area that is not a core competency for the company and later outsource this capability. Such reengineering initiatives are wasteful and steal resources from other strategic projects. Moreover, without strategic alignment, the organization‘s key stakeholders and sponsors may find themselves unable to provide the level of support the organization needs in terms of resources, especially if there are other more critical projects to the future of the business, and are more aligned with the strategic direction.

Adequate IT Infrastructure Researchers consider adequate IT infrastructure reassessment and composition as a vital factor in successful BPR implementation. Hammer (1990) prescribes the use of IT to challenge the assumptions inherent in the work process that have existed since long before the advent of modern computer and communications technology. Factors related to IT infrastructure have been increasingly considered by many researchers and practitioners as a vital component of successful BPR efforts.  

Effective alignment of IT infrastructure and BPR strategy, building an effective IT infrastructure,

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     

adequate IT infrastructure investment decision, adequate measurement of IT infrastructure effectiveness, proper information systems (IS) integration, effective reengineering of legacy IS, increasing IT function competency, and effective use of software tools are the most important factors that contribute to the success of BPR projects.

These are vital factors that contribute to building an effective IT infrastructure for business processes. BPR must be accompanied by strategic planning which addresses leveraging IT as a competitive tool. An IT infrastructure is made up of physical assets, intellectual assets, shared services, and their linkages. The way in which the IT infrastructure components are composed and their linkages determines the extent to which information resources can be delivered. An effective IT infrastructure composition process follows a top-down approach, beginning with business strategy and IS strategy and passing through designs of data, systems, and computer architecture.

Linkages between the IT infrastructure components, as well as descriptions of their contexts of interaction, are important for ensuring integrity and consistency among the IT infrastructure components. Furthermore, IT standards have a major role in reconciling various infrastructure components to provide shared IT services that are of a certain degree of effectiveness to support business process applications, as well as to guide the process of acquiring, managing, and utilizing IT assets. The IT infrastructure shared services and the human IT infrastructure components, in terms of their responsibilities and their needed expertise, are both vital to the process of the IT infrastructure composition. IT strategic alignment is approached through the process of integration between business and IT strategies, as well as between IT and organizational infrastructures.

Most analysts view BPR and IT as irrevocably linked. Walmart, for example, would not have been able to reengineer the processes used to procure and distribute mass-market retail goods without IT. Ford was able to decrease its headcount in the procurement department by 75 percent by using IT in conjunction with BPR, in another well-known example. The IT infrastructure and BPR are interdependent in the sense that deciding the information requirements for the new business processes determines the IT infrastructure constituents, and a recognition of IT capabilities provides alternatives for BPR. Building a responsive IT infrastructure is highly dependent on an appropriate determination of business process information needs. This, in turn, is determined by the types of activities embedded in a business process, and their sequencing and reliance on other organizational processes.

Effective Change Management Al-Mashari and Zairi (2000) suggest that BPR involves changes in people behavior and culture, processes, and technology. As a result, there are many factors that prevent the effective implementation of BPR and hence restrict innovation and continuous improvement. Change management, which involves all human and social related changes and cultural adjustment techniques needed by management to facilitate the insertion of newly designed processes and

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structures into working practice and to deal effectively with resistance, is considered by many researchers to be a crucial component of any BPR effort. One of the most overlooked obstacles to successful BPR project implementation is resistance from those whom implementers believe will benefit the most. Most projects underestimate the cultural impact of major process and structural change and as a result, do not achieve the full potential of their change effort. Many people fail to understand that change is not an event, but rather a management technique.

Change management is the discipline of managing change as a process, with due consideration that employees are people, not programmable machines. Change is implicitly driven by motivation which is fueled by the recognition of the need for change. An important step towards any successful reengineering effort is to convey an understanding of the necessity for change. It is a well-known fact that organizations do not change unless people change; the better change is managed, the less painful the transition is.

Organizational culture is a determining factor in successful BPR implementation.[40] Organizational culture influences the organization‘s ability to adapt to change. Culture in an organization is a self-reinforcing set of beliefs, attitudes, and behavior. Culture is one of the most resistant elements of organizational behavior and is extremely difficult to change. BPR must consider current culture in order to change these beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors effectively.

Messages conveyed from management in an organization continually enforce current culture.

Change is implicitly driven by motivation which is fueled by the recognition of the need for change.

The first step towards any successful transformation effort is to convey an understanding of the necessity for change. Management rewards system, stories of company origin and early successes of founders, physical symbols, and company icons constantly enforce the message of the current culture. Implementing BPR successfully is dependent on how thoroughly management conveys the new cultural messages to the organization. These messages provide people in the organization with a guideline to predict the outcome of acceptable behavior patterns. People should be the focus for any successful business change.

BPR is not a recipe for successful business transformation if it focuses on only computer technology and process redesign. In fact, many BPR projects have failed because they did not recognize the importance of the human element in implementing BPR. Understanding the people in organizations, the current company culture, motivation, leadership, and past performance is essential to recognize, understand, and integrate into the vision and implementation of BPR. If the human element is given equal or greater emphasis in BPR, the odds of successful business transformation increase substantially.

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Ongoing Continuous Improvement Many organizational change theorists hold a common view of organizations adjusting gradually and incrementally and responding locally to individual crises as they arise Common elements are: 















BPR is a successive and ongoing process and should be regarded as an improvement strategy that enables an organization to make the move from traditional functional orientation to one that aligns with strategic business processes.

Continuous improvement is defined as the propensity of the organization to pursue incremental and innovative improvements in its processes, products, and services. The incremental change is governed by the knowledge gained from each previous change cycle.

It is essential that the automation infrastructure of the BPR activity provides for performance measurements in order to support continuous improvements. It will need to efficiently capture appropriate data and allow access to appropriate individuals.

To ensure that the process generates the desired benefits, it must be tested before it is deployed to the end users. If it does not perform satisfactorily, more time should be taken to modify the process until it does.

A fundamental concept for quality practitioners is the use of feedback loops at every step of the process and an environment that encourages constant evaluation of results and individual efforts to improve.

At the end user‘s level, there must be a proactive feedback mechanism that provides for and facilitates resolutions of problems and issues. This will also contribute to a continuous risk assessment and evaluation which are needed throughout the implementation process to deal with any risks at their initial state and to ensure the success of the reengineering efforts.

Anticipating and planning for risk handling is important for dealing effectively with any risk when it first occurs and as early as possible in the BPR process. It is interesting that many of the successful applications of reengineering described by its proponents are in organizations practicing continuous improvement programs.

Hammer and Champy (1993) use the IBM Credit Corporation as well as Ford and Kodak, as examples of companies that carried out BPR successfully due to the fact that they had long-running continuous improvement programs.

In conclusion, successful BPR can potentially create substantial improvements in the way organizations do business and can actually produce fundamental improvements for business operations. However, in order to achieve that, there are some key success factors that must be taken into consideration when performing BPR. BPR success factors are a collection of lessons learned from reengineering projects and from these lessons common themes have emerged. In addition, the ultimate success of BPR depends on the people who do it and on how well they can be committed and motivated to be creative and to apply their detailed knowledge to the reengineering initiative. Organizations planning to undertake BPR must take into consideration the success factors of BPR in order to ensure that

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their reengineering related change efforts are comprehensive, well-implemented, and have minimum chance of failure.

Critique Many companies used reengineering as an pretext to downsize their companies dramatically, though this was not the intent of reengineering's proponents; consequently, reengineering earned a reputation for being synonymous with downsizing and layoffs.

In many circumstances, reengineering has not always lived up to its expectations. Some prominent reasons include: 

Reengineering assumes that the factor that limits an organization's performance is the ineffectiveness of its processes (which may or may not be true) and offers no means of validating that assumption.  Reengineering assumes the need to start the process of performance improvement with a "clean slate," i.e. totally disregard the status quo.  According to Eliyahu M. Goldratt (and his Theory of Constraints) reengineering does not provide an effective way to focus improvement efforts on the organization's constraint.

Others have claimed that reengineering was a recycled buzzword for commonly-held ideas.

Abrahamson (1996) argued that fashionable management terms tend to follow a lifecycle, which for Reengineering peaked between 1993 and 1996 (Ponzi and Koenig 2002). They argue that Reengineering was in fact nothing new (as e.g. when Henry Ford implemented the assembly line in 1908, he was in fact reengineering, radically changing the way of thinking in an organization).

The most frequent critique against BPR concerns the strict focus on efficiency and technology and the disregard of people in the organization that is subjected to a reengineering initiative.

Very often, the label BPR was used for major workforce reductions. Thomas Davenport, an early BPR proponent, stated that: "When I wrote about "business process redesign" in 1990, I explicitly said that using it for cost reduction alone was not a sensible goal. And consultants Michael Hammer and James Champy, the two names most closely associated with reengineering, have insisted all along that layoffs shouldn't be the point. But the fact is, once out of the bottle, the reengineering genie quickly turned ugly."

Hammer similarly admitted that: Page 90 of 120

"I wasn't smart enough about that. I was reflecting my engineering background and was insufficient appreciative of the human dimension. I've learned that's critical."

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Succession Planning The development of "high potentials" to effectively take over the current leadership when their time comes to exit their positions is known as succession planning. This type of leadership development usually requires the extensive transfer of an individual between departments. In many multinationals, it usually requires international transfer and experience to build a future leader. Succession planning requires a sharp focus on organization's future and vision, in order to align leadership development with the future the firm aspires to create. Thus successive leadership development is based not only on knowledge and history but also on a dream. For such a plan to be successful, a screening of future leadership should be based not only on "what we know and have" but also on "what we aspire to become". Persons involved in succession planning should be current leadership representing the vision and HR executives having to translate it all into a program. According to Meir Jacob and Amit Cohen (1995) three critical dimensions should be considered: 1. Skills and knowledge 2. Role perception and degree of acceptance of leading role 3. Self-efficacy (Albert Bandura). These three dimensions should be a basis of any leadership succession programme.

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Succession Planning is a process for identifying and developing internal people with the potential to fill key business leadership positions in the company. Succession planning increases the availability of experienced and capable employees that are prepared to assume these roles as they become available. Taken narrowly, "replacement planning" for key roles is the heart of succession planning. Effective succession or talent-pool management concerns itself with building a series of feeder groups up and down the entire leadership pipeline or progression (Charan, Drotter, Noel, 2001). In contrast, replacement planning is focused narrowly on identifying specific back-up candidates for given senior management positions. For the most part position-driven replacement planning (often referred to as the "truck scenario") is a forecast, which research indicates does not have substantial impact on outcomes.

Fundamental to the succession-management process is an underlying philosophy that argues that top talent in the corporation must be managed for the greater good of the enterprise. Merck and other companies argue that a "talent mindset" must be part of the leadership culture for these practices to be effective.

Succession planning is a process whereby an organization ensures that employees are recruited and developed to fill each key role within the company. Through your succession planning process, you recruit superior employees, develop their knowledge, skills, and abilities, and prepare them for advancement or promotion into ever more challenging roles. Actively pursuing succession planning ensures that employees are constantly developed to fill each needed role. As your organization expands, loses key employees, provides promotional opportunities, and increases sales, your succession planning guarantees that you have employees on hand ready and waiting to fill new roles.

According to a 2006 Canadian Federation of Independent Business survey, slightly more than one third of independent business owners plan to exit their business within the next 5 years and within the next 10 years two-thirds of owners plan to exit their business. The survey also found that small and medium sized enterprises are not adequately prepared for their business succession: only 10% of owners have a formal, written succession plan; 38% have an informal, unwritten plan; and the remaining 52% do not have any succession plan at all. The results are backed by a 2004 CIBC survey which suggests that succession planning is increasingly becoming a critical issue. By 2010, CIBC estimates that $1.2 trillion in business assets are poised to change hands.

Research indicates many succession-planning initiatives fall short of their intent (Corporate Leadership Council, 1998). "Bench strength," as it is commonly called, remains a stubborn problem in many if not most companies. Studies indicate that companies that report the greatest gains from succession planning feature high ownership by the CEO and high degrees of engagement among the larger leadership team Companies that are well known for their succession planning and executive talent development practices include: GE, Honeywell, IBM, Marriott, Microsoft, Pepsi and Procter & Gamble.

Research indicates that clear objectives are critical to establishing effective succession planning.

These objectives tend to be core to many or most companies that have well-established practices:

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   

Identify those with the potential to assume greater responsibility in the organization Provide critical development experiences to those that can move into key roles Engage the leadership in supporting the development of high-potential leaders Build a data base that can be used to make better staffing decisions for key jobs

In other companies these additional objectives may be embedded in the succession process:   

Improve employee commitment and retention Meet the career development expectations of existing employees Counter the increasing difficulty and costs of recruiting employees externally

Business Exit Planning With the global proliferation of Small and Mid-sized Enterprises (SME‘s), issues of business succession and continuity have become increasingly common. When the owner of a business becomes incapacitated or passes away, it is often necessary to shut down an otherwise healthy business. Or in many instances, successors inherit a healthy business, which is forced into bankruptcy because of lack of available liquidity to pay inheritance taxes and other taxes. Proper planning helps avoid many of the problems associated with succession and transfer of ownership.

Business Exit Planning is a body of knowledge which began developing in the United States towards the end of the 20th century, and is now spreading globally. A Business Exit Planning exercise begins with the shareholder(s) of a company defining their objectives with respect to an eventual exit, and then executing their plan, as the following definition suggests: Business Exit Planning is the process of explicitly defining exit-related objectives for the owner(s) of a business, followed by the design of a comprehensive strategy and road map that take into account all personal, business, financial, legal, and taxation aspects of achieving those objectives, usually in the context of planning the leadership succession and continuity of a business. Objectives may include maximizing (or setting a goal for) proceeds, minimizing risk, closing a Transaction quickly, or selecting an investor that will ensure that the business prospers.

The strategy should also take into account contingencies such as illness or death.

All personal and business aspects should be taken into consideration. This is also a good time to plan an efficient transfer from the point of view of possibly applicable estate taxes, capital gains taxes, or other taxes.

Sale of a business is not the only form of exit. Forms of exit may also include Initial Public Offering, Management Buyout, passing on the firm to next-of-kin, or even bankruptcy. Bringing on board financial strategic or financial partners may also be considered a form of exit, to the extent that it may help ensure succession and survival of the business.

In developed countries, the so-called ―baby boomer‖ demographic wave is now reaching the stage where serious consideration needs to be given to exit. Hence, the importance of Business Exit Planning is expected to further increase in the coming years.

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Field of Succession Management

There is a substantial body of literature on the subject of succession planning. The first book that addressed the topic fully was "Executive Continuity" by Walter Mahler. Mahler was responsible in the 1970s for helping to shape the General Electric succession process which became the gold standard of corporate practice.

Mahler, who was heavily influenced by Peter Drucker, wrote three other books on the subject of succession, all of which are out of print. His colleagues, Steve Drotter and Greg Kesler, as well as others, expanded on Mahler's work in their writings. "The Leadership Pipeline: How to Build the Leadership Powered Company," by Charan, Drotter and Noel is noteworthy. A new edited collection of materials, edited by Marshall Goldsmith, describes many contemporary examples in large companies.

Most large corporations assign a process owner for talent and succession management.

Resourcing of the work varies widely from numbers of highly dedicated internal consultants to limited professional support embedded in the roles of human resources generalists. Often these staff resources are separate from external staffing or recruiting functions.

Some companies today seek to integrate internal and external staffing. Others are more inclined to integrate succession management with the performance management process in order simplify the work for line managers.

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Family Business Arieu proposed a model in order to classify family firms into four scenarios: political, openness, foreign management and natural succession.

POLITICAL SCENARIO: This is the case of a company linked to a large family, where it is expected that through inheritance, the property was spray quickly, possibly faster than the growth of own business, resulting in a dividend per head lower and lower. Identifying suitable members in the family can incorporate to address and possibly distinguish who may occupy the general direction afterwards. However, the existence of many members in the family can turn into conflicts of power, making it necessary to establish agreements and occasionally reorganize the business in terms of those individuals who, because of the obvious professional and human qualities can be recognized as leaders. In many cases this may mean separate reorganization to create new companies and business units.

OPENESS: When members of the next generations are numerous and among them is not possible to identify a person who possesses the characteristics necessary to assume leadership positions with expertise in family business, we have a scenario that we call Open, since the strategy more suitable for this type of organization is to shift some capital to others who can provide not only management skills but also liquidity for family members. This will succeed in securing the future of the business, creating more value for society and retention of jobs for their employees, not to please the family, getting money and avoid future complications.

FOREIGN MANAGEMENT: This scenario occurs when family members who control the business are not many, and yet, not having any of its members with a natural profile of leadership succession when they choose to appoint a non-family CEO .

NATURAL SUCCESSION: Families seeking to preserve its legacy business are the most favorable conditions in the presence of a stage of natural succession. This is the case of a company controlled by a few families, few heirs who in turn have identified among them a worthy successor, a strong name also is associated with the adequacy enough to drive its growth, the ability to run the organization, understanding market and commitment which means only a part of the family patrimony is also a source of value to society, other shareholders, customers, suppliers and even their own employees (stakeholders).this will help in improved succession planning.

The Role of Advisors A Prior preparation needs to be done for the replacement of a CEO in family firms. The role of advisors is important as they help with the transition of leadership between the current generation leaders and the successors. Advisors help family owned businesses establish their own leadership skills. This process is relatively long if the successors want to be accepted by all employees.

They need to take higher managing position gradually to be respected. During this process, the successors are asked to develop different skills such as leadership. This is where the role of advisors fully exemplifies its importance. It is when the managing position is shared between the first generation leader, the second and the advisors. An advisor helps with communication Page 97 of 120

because emotional factors between family members can affect badly the company. The advisors help manage everything during a predetermined period of time and make the succession process less painful and eventful for everybody. In these cases, an interim leadership is usually what is best for the company. The employees can get accustomed to changes while getting to know the future CEO.

Process and Practices Companies devise elaborate models to characterize their succession and development practices. Most reflect a cyclical series of activities that include these fundamentals:     

Identify key roles for succession or replacement planning Define the competencies and motivational profile required to undertake those roles Assess people against these criteria - with a future orientation Identify pools of talent that could potentially fill

and perform highly in key roles Develop employees to be ready for advancement into key roles - primarily through the right set of experiences.

In many companies, over the past several years, the emphasis has shifted from planning job assignments to development, with much greater focus on managing key experiences that are critical to growing global business leaders. North American companies tend to be more active in this regard, followed by European and Latin American countries.

PepsiCo, IBM and Nike are current examples of the so-called "game planning" approach to succession and talent management. In these and other companies annual reviews are supplemented with an ongoing series of discussions among senior leaders about who is ready to assume larger roles. Vacancies are anticipated and slates of names are prepared based on highest potential and readiness for job moves. Organization realignments are viewed as critical windows of opportunity to create development moves that will serve the greater good of the enterprise.

Assessment is a key practice in effective succession planning. There is no widely accepted formula for evaluating the future potential of leaders, but there are many tools and approaches that continue to be used today, ranging from personality and cognitive testing to team-based interviewing and simulations and other assessment center methods. Elliott Jaques and others have argued for the importance of focusing assessments narrowly on critical differentiators of future performance. Jaques developed a persuasive case for measuring candidates' ability to manage complexity, formulating a robust operational definition of business intelligence. The Cognitive Process Profile (CPP) psychometric is an example of a tool used in succession planning to measure candidates' ability to manage complexity according to Jaques' definition.

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Companies struggle to find practices that are effective and practical. It is clear leaders who rely on instinct and gut to make promotion decisions are often not effective. Research indicates that the most valid practices for assessment are those that involve multiple methods and especially multiple raters "Calibration meetings," composed of senior leaders can be quite effective judging a slate of potential senior leaders with the right tools and facilitation.

With organisations facing increasing complexity and uncertainty in their operating environments some suggest a move away from competence based approaches. In a future that is increasingly hard to predict leaders will need to see opportunity in volatility, spot patterns in complexity, find creative solutions to problems, keep in mind long term strategic goals for the organization and wider society, and hold onto uncertainty until the optimum time to make a decision.

Professionals in the field, including academics, consultants and corporate practitioners, have many strongly held views on the topic. Best practice is a slippery concept in this field. There are many thought pieces on the subject that readers may find valuable such as "Debunking 10 Top Talent Management Myths", Talent Management Magazine, Doris Sims, December 2009.

Research-based writing is more difficult to find. The Corporate Leadership Council, The Best Practice Institute (BPI) and the Center for Creative Leadership, as well as the Human Resources Planning Society are sources of some effective research-based materials.

Over the years, organizations have changed their approach to succession planning. What used to be a rigid, confidential process of hand-picking executives to be company successors is now becoming a more fluid, transparent practice that identifies high-potential leaders and incorporates development programs preparing them for top positions. Today, corporations consider succession planning a part of a holistic strategy called ―talent management‖. According to the company PEMCO, ―talent management is defined as the activities and processes throughout the employee life cycle: recruiting and hiring, onboarding, training, professional development, performance management, workforce planning, leadership development, career development, cross-functional work assignments, succession planning, and the employee exit process‖. When managing internal talent, companies must ―know whether the right people, are moving at the right pace into the right jobs at the right time‖. An effective succession planning strategy, coupled with solid career development programs, will help paint a more promising future for employees.

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Ambidextrous Organizations Organizational ambidexterity refers to an organization‘s ability to be efficient in its management of today‘s business and also adaptable for coping with tomorrow‘s changing demand. Just as being ambidextrous means being able to use both the left and right hand equally, organizational ambidexterity requires the organizations to use both exploration and exploitation techniques to be successful.

Origin and Development Organizational ambidexterity was defined as an organization‘s ability to be aligned and efficient in its management of today‘s business demands as well as being adaptive to changes in the environment at the same time. This term of organizational ambidexterity was first used by Duncan, however, it was March that had been credited for developing and generating greater interest in this concept, especially in the late 20th and early 21st century.

Ambidexterity in an organization is achieved by balancing exploration and exploitation, which allows the organization to be creative and adaptable, while also continuing to rely on more traditional, proven methods of business. Exploration includes things such as search, variation, risk taking, experimentation, flexibility, discovery or innovation, whereas exploitation includes such things as refinement, choice, production, efficiency, selection, implementation, and execution.

Companies that focus only on exploration face the risk of wasting resources on ideas that may not prove useful or never be developed. On the other hand, companies that focus only on exploitation may accept status quo performance and products and fail to reach optimal levels of success.

Organizational ambidexterity is defined broadly, and several other terms are also highly related or similar to the construct of ambidextrous organization, including organizational learning, technological innovation, organizational adaptation, strategic management, and organizational design. Things such as reconciling exploitation and exploration, the simultaneity of induced and autonomous strategy processes, synchronizing incremental and discontinuous innovation, and balancing search and stability also tend to refer to the same underlying construct as ambidextrous organization.

Whereas earlier studies regarded the trade-offs between exploration and exploitation to be insurmountable, more recent research has paid attention to a range of organizational solutions to engender the existence of ambidexterity. One recent hot research topic in this area focused on the leadership characteristics that enable organizations to manage the contradictions that they face and achieve ambidexterity, which is the origin of the concept ‗ambidextrous leadership‘. Several antecedents, outcomes of organizational ambidexterity as well as related moderators have also been identified in the existing literature. These topics are introduced in later sections.

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Two Models Organizational ambidexterity can be considered primarily from two angles. One is architectural or structural ambidexterity, which uses dual organizational structures and strategies to differentiate efforts towards exploitation and exploration. Structural ambidexterity includes dual parts, with one part focusing on exploitation and the other focusing on exploration. It‘s also known as the spatial separation of the dual strategies concepts outlined above. The other approach is contextual ambidexterity, which uses behavioral and social means to integrate exploitation and exploration at the organizational unit level. Contextual ambidexterity is a balanced type that takes a mid-level position between exploitation and exploration, also known as parallel structures or hybrid strategies.

Although both angles are related to the theme of organizational ambidexterity, they strongly differ in the way how they are configured.

There has always been a debate of which of the two different approaches is right. The balanced type (i.e. contextual ambidexterity) is consistent with the systems approach of fit across multiple dimensions, but contradicts the opinion that organizational choice is discrete. On the other hand, the dual type allows both discrete orientations and fit across dimensions at the unit level but creates a misfit between organizational units. Some researchers argued that inconsistent structures may lead to low performance. There are also some researchers trying to investigate the external and internal contingencies under which different configurations can be found.

One factor would be the speed and type of technological change that organizations confront. In an environment where changes are slow, there will be sufficient time to react to the radical changes by constructing dual structures and strategies. However, in a high-competitive environment, balanced structures may be better prepared to deal with the constant need for alignment. In future studies, the different organizational ambidexterity configurations can be compared to find a better solution for dealing with the exploitation and exploration paradox.

Antecedents Ambidexterity is often considered a capacity or skill and can therefore be facilitated by either the organization as a whole or managers / CEOs. From the structural ambidexterity‘s view, organizations can solve the paradox by temporarily cycling through periods of exploitation and periods of exploration. From the other point of view (contextual ambidexterity), firms ought to address exploitation and exploration simultaneously and internally to achieve the goal ambidexterity.[9][10] Contextual ambidexterity is more difficult to achieve than structural ambidexterity because managing two inconsistent alignments within an organization Page 102 of 120

simultaneously is far more complex than managing one consistent strategy after another. Thus most studies on how to build ambidextrous organizations in literature focused on contextual ambidexterity rather than structural ambidexterity.

The role of leaders (or managers) is always highlighted towards building an ambidextrous organization. Several recommendations have been made to organizations on how to achieve contextual ambidexterity, including using of meta-routines and job-enrichment schemes, building trust with supervisees, being supportive, using complex behavioral repertoires, and the creation of a shared vision.

In addition, several characteristics of organizational culture are also emphasized on building an ambidextrous organization. Successful organizations should be able to balance the hard elements (discipline and stretch) and the soft elements (support and trust) in their organizational contexts.

It was also suggested that establishing shared goals, developing a collective identity, creating a culture of support, and giving personal meaning to individuals‘ contributions to the overall purpose of an organization all contributes to ambidexterity. A decentralized structure and a culture of excellence, recruitment and training are also important aspects of establishing an ambidextrous organization.

Outcomes Ambidexterity is beneficial to organizations in many aspects. As it is the ability to keep a balance between explorative and exploitative processes, the most core outcome of ambidexterity is innovation because innovation needs both explorative and exploitative aspects. Innovation is defined as ―the sequence of activities by which a new element is introduced into a social unit, with the intention of benefiting the unit, some part of it, or the wider society‖ (West & Farr, 1990). The new element need not be entirely novel or unfamiliar to members of the unit, but it must involve some discernible change or challenge to the status quo (West & Farr, 1990). Most theoretical models of innovation differentiate at least two processes: idea generation and idea implementation (e.g., Amabile, 1988; West, 2002). The generation phase is closely linked to explorative activities while the implementation phase is highly linked to exploitative activities.

An ambidextrous organization is able to pursue innovation (creating new products/services) while also maintaining itself through the continued use of proven techniques/products.

In addition, ambidexterity can promote some other positive organizational outcomes besides innovation. It has been proved in literature that the interaction between explorative and exploitative innovation strategies (in other words, ambidexterity) is positively related to sales growth rate, and imbalance between explorative and exploitative innovation strategies is negatively related to sales growth rate (He & Wong, 2004). Various organizations have been able to overcome organizational challenges and become more innovative because of ambidexterity. A study looking at 41 businesses found that ambidexterity was highly correlated with performance.

Similarly, another study of 34 high-tech organizations showed that their ability to simultaneously execute exploration and exploitation was associated with higher performance (Chandrasekaran et al. 2012).

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Companies such as Apple, General Radio, Nordstrom and British Airways have all had continued success throughout the years because of their capacity for ambidexterity. From 1981 to 1986, British Airways experienced increased profits and customer satisfaction. The top executives of British Airways credited the formation of a more ambidextrous culture and leadership with the company‘s improved performance.

Related Moderators

Moderators exist in the relationship between organizational ambidexterity and organizational outcomes. Environmental dynamism and competitiveness moderate the relationship between exploitation/ exploration and performance (Levinthal & March, 1993; Lewin, Long & Carroll, 1999). Empirical studies also showed that pursuing exploratory innovation is more effective in dynamic environments, whereas pursuing exploitative innovation is more beneficial to a unit‘s financial performance in more competitive environments (Jansen, van den Bosch, & Volberda, 2006). Although they were not directly testing an ambidextrous orientation, results indicated a positive performance effect of simultaneously pursuing exploitative and exploratory innovation under high dynamic and competitive environments. The effects of exploitative, explorative and balanced corporate alignment activities on performance were compared under varying environmental conditions (Raisch & Hotz, 2008). The construct of ―environmental munificence‖ was developed to reflect an organization‘s opportunities and dynamism (Zahra, 1993). They found that, although exploration was positively related to performance under high environmental munificence, a balanced orientation failed to significantly affect performance in times of low environmental munificence (Raisch & Hotz, 2008).

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Market orientation was also proved to moderate the relationship between exploitation/ exploration and performance. Market orientation was defined as ―the capability to generate, disseminate, and respond to intelligence pertaining to current and future customers‖ (Kohli & Jaworski, 1990). A longitudinal study by Kyriakopoulos and Moorman (2004) showed that market orientation positively moderates the impact of pursuing high levels of exploitative and exploratory marketing strategies on new product performance; however, firms that pursue an ambidextrous orientation without strong market orientation display a significant reduction in new product financial performance.

Another factor that may moderate ambidexterity‘s effect on performance is firm resources (Kyriakopoulos & Moorman, 2004). Firms with rich resources have the ability to exploit and explore simultaneously, whereas firms with less resources may not be able to afford such a complex strategy. Similarly, Lubatkin et al. stated that small firms ―lack the amount of slack resources and the kind of hierarchical administration systems that can help or impede larger firms in managing their contradictory knowledge processes and, thus, affect the attainment of ambidexterity‖ (p. 647). This idea was supported by empirical evidence that small firms may benefit more from a one-sided orientation than from mixed strategies (Ebben & Johnson, 2005).

Boundary conditions were also addressed on choosing between structural and contextual ambidexterity. For example, spatial separation was suggested as an appropriate solution for environments characterized by long periods of stability, disrupted by rare events of discontinuous change. Research also found that firms operating in dynamic competitive environments rely on contextual ambidexterity rather than developing spatially separated units (Jansen, van den Bosch, & Volberda, 2005).

Levels of Ambidexterity The functional definition of ambidexterity was originally used to describe organizations, but recently this concept was extended to multiple organizational levels, including individuals, teams, and leaders. On the most general level, the concept of ambidexterity implies successfully managing the dichotomy of explorative variability creation and exploitative variability reduction.

Whenever there are needs to be both explorative and exploitive, conflict occurs (Bledow, Frese, Anderson, Erez, & Farr, 2009). That‘s when ambidexterity is necessary. Actually, regulating the conflicting demands of innovation is not only a challenge for the upper echelon of an organization but also a phenomenon that spans all levels of an organization. Employees as individuals, collectives of employees such as work teams, and the organization as a whole all have to find strategies to deal with conflicting demands in order to succeed in innovation and adaption to changing markets. Some examples of strategies and tactics that could be implemented at all three levels of analysis were also listed out (Bledow et al., 2009). These examples are presented in Table 1, including a separation strategy (in the Separation column) or an integration strategy (in the last two columns).

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Ambidextrous Leadership Recently the focus on organizational ambidexterity has become more concentrated on how leaders act ambidextrously to achieve organizational ambidexterity. Senior managers may be the key for facilitating the context and social base for ambidexterity. Noting that ambidextrous organizations require significant amounts of mobilization, coordination, and integration activities to maintain both exploitation and exploration, informal and social integration of the senior team as well as the cross-functional interfaces of the formal organization contribute to the success of organizational ambidexterity significantly (Jansen, Tempelaar, van den Bosch, & Volberda, 2009). A recent model of ambidexterity and leadership suggests that CEOs and top management teams (TMT) play an integral role in establishing ambidexterity in smallto-medium sized organizations (Cao, Simsek, & Zhang, 2010). The model suggests TMTs are where processes such as information sharing and knowledge processing, which influence ambidexterity, are likely to occur.

Furthermore, it is the CEO who has the ability to access the most valuable and diverse information needed to avoid separation of explorative and exploitative behaviors. The greater the interface between TMTs and CEOs in small-to-medium sized organizations, the greater the amount of ambidexterity.

The concept of ambidexterity was first formally introduced into the leadership area by the Rosing, Frese and Bausch (2011) paper, holding the idea that leaders should be able to lead their team to match the complexity and the pace of innovation (Ancona, Goodman, Lawrence, & Tushman, 2001). Ambidextrous leadership was defined as the leaders‘ ability to foster both explorative and exploitative behaviors in followers by increasing or reducing variance in their behavior and flexibly switching between those behaviors (Rosing et al., 2011).

The construct of ambidextrous leadership has also been linked to the combination of leadership styles (Jansen et al., 2009). Leaders who are transformational encourage ―out of the box thinking‖, information sharing and question assumptions.Transformational leaders promote exploration and innovative thinking. Transactional leaders focus on making incremental improvements and making the best use of existing process. The transactional leadership style promotes exploitative behaviors. An ambidextrous leader is able to switch back and forth between transformation/exploration and transaction/exploitation as needed, in other words, being able to switch between different leadership styles at the appropriate time, in order to foster Page 106 of 120

innovation and then implement plans. Ambidextrous leadership consists of three elements (1) opening leader behaviors to foster exploration, (2) closing leader behaviors to foster exploitation, (3) and the temporal flexibility to switch between both as the situation requires (Rosing et al., 2011). Opening leadership behaviors include: allowing for multiple ways to accomplish a task, experimentation and errors, whereas closing behaviors include; monitoring routines, sticking to plans and minimizing errors. The Rosing et al. (2011)‘s model of leadership and innovation was shown in Figure 1.

Controversy and Future Directions Some scholars as well as practitioners have argued that established companies simply lack the flexibility to explore new territories. One contributing reason could be the so-called success trap (i.e. the focus on their, historically successful, current business activities) (Walrave, Van Oorschot, & Romme, 2011). A possible solution for big companies is to adopt a venture capital model - funding exploratory expeditions but otherwise not interfering too much with their operations. Another suggestion is for the use of cross-functional teams to achieve breakthrough innovations. Still others have suggested that a company may be able to alternate between different organizational models, focusing on exploitation and exploration at different time periods. For example, in a study of biotechnology firms it is shown how an organization's management control system can be adjusted periodically to achieve this changing focus on exploitation and exploration. Researchers also debate if ambidexterity can be attained because exploration and exploitation tend to emerge from contradictory information and knowledge inputs and because success due to exploration/exploitation tends to be self-reinforcing leading to the use of the same methods in the future. An empirical study of ambidexterity in organizations (He & Wong, 2004) further cautions that very low levels of both exploration and exploitation are not sufficient to contribute to superior firm performance.

Ambidexterity can also be hampered by employee desire to receive organizational rewards. If organizations base their evaluation and reward systems on the completion of routine tasks, employees will be more likely to conform to standardized procedures. To avoid hindering ambidexterity, organizations should be sure to reward innovative thinking as well as completion of routine tasks.

Despite the controversy surrounding the possibility of organizational ambidexterity, it is likely to continue to be a highly researched concept in the future. Future research is likely to focus on the role of ambidextrous leaders, ambidextrous teams and the social context of organizational ambidexterity. (Rosing et al., 2011).

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Communities of Innovation Communities that support innovation have been referred to as Communities of Innovation (CoI), Communities for Innovation, Innovation Communities, Open Innovation Communities, Communities of Creation.

Overview Origin Coakes and Smith (2007) define Communities of Innovation (CoI) as a form of Communities of Practice that are dedicated to the support of innovation.

They suggest that CoI can be formed from champions of innovation and their social network and that CoI are safe places for the creation and support of innovatory ideas.

COI are groups made up of motivated individuals working together towards a common goal, not because of orders from their superiors, but because they are convinced of their common cause.

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Development

Communities of Creation Sawhney and Prandelli (2000) proposed the model of Communities of Creation as a new governance mechanism for managing knowledge found in different companies for the purpose of innovation. Intellectual property rights are considered to be owned by the entire community although the community is governed by a central firm which acts as the sponsor and defines the ground rules for participation. This model lies between the closed hierarchical model and the open market-based model.

Communities of Innovation Compared to Communities of Practice These are Communities that take total financial, administrative and operational control over the development of their communities. Democratically elected and answerable to the whole community. It is simply an extension of the community saving societies that have existed for centuries.

The prime objective is sustainable environmental and social development controlled by the skills and finance available. It provides employment, improves the future prospects for all participants and their children, and injects a sense of pride and achievement. Using locally available materials linked to new environmentally friendly cost effective construction materials will produce affordable housing, schools and roads.

The Aga Khan Foundation is focused on reducing rural poverty, particularly in resource-poor, degraded or remote environments. The Aga Khan Foundation created the model of participatory rural development.

The model of participatory rural development combines a set of common development principles with the flexibility to respond to specific contexts and needs. Programmes typically link elements such as rural savings and credit, natural resource management, productive infrastructure development, increased agricultural productivity and human skills development with a central concern for community-level participation and decision-making. The ultimate goal is to enable community members to make informed choices from a range of appropriate options for sustainable and equitable development.

An example of something that uses this model of participatory rural development and attempts to enact Communities of Innovation is Aggrebind, a soil stabilizer. AggreBind is a, "unique, environmentally friendly, cross-linked, water based, styrene acrylic polymer with proprietary tracers. AggreBind is available in a wide range of colors to produce roads from insitu materials and for the manufacturing of blocks, bricks and pavers, for buildings and homes without using any cement."

AggreBind deliberately focuses on marketing its product for use in rural communities, giving the inhabitants of these regions the tools to utilize AggreBind as a building material and create a green, self-sustainable, better place to live.

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Examples of Communities of Innovation The COI that Developed Linux Traditionally, the company is the most efficient mean of managing knowledge belonging to different people. The primary motivation is job security, career advancement and recognition.

Lee and Cole (2003) argue for a community structure for knowledge creation that crosses firms‘ boundaries.

To substantiate their argument they put forth the case of how ―thousands of talented volunteers, dispersed across organizational and geographical boundaries, collaborate via the Internet to produce a knowledge-intensive, innovative product of high quality,‖ the Linux kernel (Lee and Cole 2003, p. 633). The Linux community has proved to be a very efficient mean of managing knowledge belonging to different people.

The primary motivation is value system, recognition and potential career advancement or hop.

Lee and Cole (2003) argue that research on knowledge management has to date focused on hierarchy and therefore has not adequately addressed the mobilization of distributed knowledge, knowledge that is dispersed among many people. They note that, as illustrated by the Linux case, ―the advent of the Internet and Web-based technologies has enabled specialized communities to convene, interact, and share resources extensively via electronic interfaces,‖ even across firms‘ boundaries (Lee and Cole 2003, p. 633).

People are able to contribute effectively outside their working hours. coordination of the work (including feedback) is possible even when people are working from different locations. The catchment area is therefore much larger and the critical mass of software engineers required to develop and maintain the Linux project was therefore achievable.

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Benefits of Community of Innovation Organizational Ambidexterity Successful COIs increase innovations within an organization. They therefore have the potential to contribute to organizational ambidexterity, which refers to the organization‘s dual capabilities of managing current business and being flexible and adaptable to meet future changes and demands.

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References ______

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organization_development 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_development 3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leadership_development 4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_dynamics 5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Change_management 6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organizational_culture 7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organizational_diagnostics 8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_process_reengineering 9. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Succession_planning 10. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambidextrous_organization 11. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communities_of_innovation 12. http://www.sagepub.com/upm-data/41238_1.pdf 13. http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/67375/10.1177_0021886374010 00403.pdf?sequence=2

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Attachment A What Is Organizational Development

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CHAPTER 1

What Is Organization Development?

T

hink for a moment about the organizations to which you belong. You probably have many to name, such as the company where you work, a school, perhaps a volunteer organization, or a reading group. You are undoubtedly influenced by many other organizations in your life, such as a health care organization like a doctor’s office or hospital, a church group, a child’s school, a bank, or the local city council or state government. Using an expansive definition of organization, you could name your own family or a group of friends as an organization that you belong to as well. With just a few moments’ reflection, you are likely to be able to name dozens of organizations that you belong to or that influence you.

Now consider an organization that you currently do not belong to, but one that you were dissatisfied with at some point in the past. What was it about that organization that made the experience dissatisfying? Perhaps you left a job because you did not have the opportunity to contribute that you would have liked. Maybe it was a dissatisfying team atmosphere, or you were not appreciated or recognized for the time and energy that you dedicated to the job. It could have been a change to your responsibilities, the team, or the organization’s processes. Some people report that they did not feel a larger sense of purpose at work, they did not have control or autonomy over their work, or they did not find an acceptable path to growth and career development. Perhaps you’ve witnessed or been part of an organization that has failed for some reason. Perhaps it went out of business or it disbanded because it could no longer reach its goals.

You’ve likely had some excellent experiences in organizations, too. You may have had a job that was especially fulfilling or where you learned a great deal and coworkers became good friends. Maybe your local volunteer organization helped a number of people through organized fundraisers or other social services activities.

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Perhaps you joined or started a local community group to successfully campaign against the decision of your local city council or school board.

All of this is to demonstrate what you already know intuitively, that we spend a great deal of our lives working in, connected to, and affected by organizations.

Some of these organizations function quite well, whereas others struggle. Some are quite rewarding environments in which to work or participate, but in others, organizational members are frustrated, neglected, and disengaged.

The purpose of this book is to introduce you to the field of organization development, an area of academic study and professional practice focused on making organizations better—that is, more effective and productive and at the same time more rewarding, satisfying, and engaging places in which to work and participate.

By learning about the field of organization development and the process by which it is conducted, you will be a more effective change agent inside the organizations to which you belong.

Organization Development Defined Organization development (OD) is an interdisciplinary field with contributions from business, industrial/organizational psychology, human resources management, communication, sociology, and many other disciplines. Not surprisingly, for a field with such diverse intellectual roots, there are many definitions of organization development. Definitions can be illuminating as they point us in a direction and provide a shared context for mutual discussion, but they can also be constraining as certain concepts are inevitably left out with boundaries drawn to exclude some activities. What counts as OD thus depends on the practitioner and the definition, and these definitions have changed over time. In a study of 27 definitions of organization development published since 1969, Egan (2002) found that there were as many as 60 different variables listed in those definitions. Nonetheless, there are some points on which definitions converge.

One of the most frequently cited definitions of OD comes from Richard Beckhard (1969), an early leader in the field of OD: Organization development is an effort (1) planned, (2) organizationwide, and (3) managed from the top, to (4) increase organization effectiveness and health through (5) planned interventions in the organization’s “processes,” using behavioral-science knowledge. (p. 9) Beckhard’s definition has many points that have survived the test of time, including his emphasis on organizational effectiveness, the use of behavioral science knowledge, and the inclusion of planned interventions in the organization’s functions. Some critique this definition, however, for its emphasis on planned change (many organizational changes, and thus OD efforts, are in response to environmental threats that are not so neatly planned) and its emphasis on the need to drive organizational change through top management. Many contemporary OD

Chapter 1

What Is Organization Development?

3

activities do not necessarily happen at the top management level, as increasingly organizations are developing less hierarchical structures.

A more recent definition comes from Burke and Bradford (2005): Based on (1) a set of values, largely humanistic; (2) application of the behavioral sciences; and (3) open systems theory, organization development is a systemwide process of planned change aimed toward improving overall organization effectiveness by way of enhanced congruence of such key organizational dimensions as external environment, mission, strategy, leadership, culture, structure, information and reward systems, and work policies and procedures. (p. 12) Finally, I offer a third: Organization development is the process of increasing organizational effectiveness and facilitating personal and organizational change through the use of interventions driven by social and behavioral science knowledge.

These definitions include a number of consistent themes about what constitutes organization development. They propose that an outcome of OD activities is organizational effectiveness. They also each stress the applicability of knowledge gained through the social and behavioral sciences (such as sociology, business and management, psychology, and more) to organizational settings.

Change Is a Constant Pressure Perhaps the point on which most definitions agree is that the backdrop and purpose of organization development is change. As you have no doubt personally experienced, large-scale organizational change is rarely simple and met without skepticism. As Peter Senge writes, “Most of us know firsthand that change programs fail. We’ve seen enough ‘flavor of the month’ programs ‘rolled out’ from top management to last a lifetime” (Senge et al., 1999, p. 6). Because of its impact on the organizational culture and potential importance to the organization’s success, organizational change has been a frequent topic of interest to both academic and popular management thinkers. With change as the overriding context for OD work, OD practitioners develop interventions so that change can be developed and integrated into the organization’s functioning.

To become effective, productive, and satisfying to members, organizations need to change. It will come as no surprise to any observer of today’s organizations that change is a significant part of organizational life. Change is required at the organizational level as customers demand more, technologies are developed with a rapidly changing life cycle (especially high-tech products; Wilhelm, Damodaran, & Li, 2003), and investors demand results. This requires that organizations develop new strategies, economic structures, technologies, organizational structures, and processes. As a result, change is also required of individuals. Employees learn new skills

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as jobs change or are eliminated. Organizational members are expected to quickly and flexibly adapt to the newest direction. Best-selling business books such as Who Moved My Cheese? teach lessons in ensuring that one’s skills are current and that being comfortable and reluctant to adapt is a fatal flaw. For organizational members, change can be enlightening and exciting, and it can be hurtful, stressful, and frustrating.

Whether or not we agree with the values behind “change as a constant,” it is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. Whereas some decry an overabundance of change in organizations (Zorn, Christensen, & Cheney, 1999), others note that it is the defining characteristic of the current era in organizations and that becoming competent at organizational change is a necessary and distinguishing characteristic of successful organizations (Lawler & Worley, 2006). There are, however, more- and less-effective ways to manage change. Creating and managing change in order to create higher performing organizations in which individuals can grow and develop is a central theme of the field of OD. When we speak of organization development, we are referring to the management of certain kinds of these changes, especially how people implement and are affected by them.

What Organization Development Looks Like It may be easiest to understand what organization development is by understanding what forms it takes and how it is practiced. The following are five examples of published case studies of OD in action.

Example 1: Increasing Employee Participation in a Public Sector Organization (O’Brien, 2002) Public sector organizations, it has been noted (Coram & Burns, 2001), often face additional special challenges in the management of change. Bureaucratic structures, interfaces with regional governments and legislatures, political pressures, and legislative policies all complicate the implementation of new processes and changes to organizational practices. In the Republic of Ireland, a special initiative launched in the mid-1990s aimed to reduce bureaucracy in the public sector to gain efficiency, improve customer service, and improve interdepartmental coordination.

Many programs of this type have been launched in other organizations as topdown mandates from senior management, causing frustration and decreased commitment among staff members who resisted the mandated changes.

One department wanted to do things differently. The offices were in the division of Social Welfare Services (SWS), a community welfare organization of 4,000 employees. Two Dublin offices (50 employees each) became the focus of this case.

These offices chose to involve employees in the development of an initiative that would improve working conditions in the department as well as increase the employees’ capacity for managing changes. A project steering team was formed, and they began by administering an employee survey to inquire about working relationships, career development, training, technology, and management. Follow-up

Chapter 1

What Is Organization Development?

data gathering occurred in focus groups and individual interviews. The tremendous response rate of more than 90% gave the steering team a positive feeling about the engagement of the population, but the results of the survey indicated that a great deal of improvement was necessary. Many employees felt underappreciated, distrusted, and not included in key decisions or changes. Relationships with management were also a concern as employees indicated few opportunities for communication with management and that jobs had become routine and dull.

The steering team invited volunteers (employees and their management) to work on several of the central problems. One team worked on the problem of communication and proposed many changes that were later implemented, including a redesign of the office layout to improve circulation and contact among employees.

As the teams continued discussions, they began to question standard practices and inefficiencies and to suggest improvements, eventually devising a list of almost 30 actions that they could take. Managers listened to employee suggestions, impressed by their insights. As one manager put it, “I have learned that a little encouragement goes a long way and people are capable of much more than given credit for in their normal everyday routine” (O’Brien, 2002, p. 450).

The joint management-employee working teams had begun to increase collaboration and interaction among the two groups, with each reaching new insights about the other. As a result of the increased participation, “There appeared to be an enhanced acceptance of the change process, coupled with demands for better communications, increased involvement in decision making, changed relationships with supervisors and improved access to training and development opportunities” (p. 451).

Example 2: Senior Management Coaching at Vodaphone (Eaton & Brown, 2002) Vodaphone is a multibillion-dollar global communications technology company headquartered in the United Kingdom and was an early leader in the mobile telephone market. Faced with increasing competition, the company realized that in order to remain innovative and a leader in a challenging market, the culture of the organization would need to adapt accordingly. Specifically, senior management realized that its current “command and control” culture of blame and political games would hinder collaboration and mutual accountability needed to succeed in a competitive environment. Instead, the company wanted to encourage a culture of empowered teams who made their own decisions and shared learning and development, speed, and accountability.

Several culture initiatives were implemented, including the development of shared values, the introduction of IT systems that shared and exchanged information across major divisions that had hindered cross-functional learning, and the establishment of teams and a team-building program.

To support the initiatives and encourage a new, collaborative management style, Vodaphone implemented a leadership coaching program. Through the program, top managers attended a program to learn skills in conducting performance reviews, helping employees set goals, and coaching teams. Following the program, managers had one-on-one coaching sessions with a professional coach who worked

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with participants to help them set coaching goals and reflect on how successfully they were able to implement the skills learned in the program.

As a result of the program, managers began to delegate more as teams started to solve problems themselves. Teams began to feel more confident in their decisions as managers trusted them. The authors attribute several subsequent company successes to the program, noting that it was critical that the coaching program was integrated with the other culture change initiatives that it supported.

“Cultural change takes time,” Eaton and Brown (2002, p. 287) note, and “traditional attitudes to management do not die away overnight.” However, they point out that a gradual evolution took place and the new cultural values are now the standard.

Example 3: Team Development in a Cancer Center (Black & Westwood, 2004) Health care workers who have the challenge of caring for critically ill patients experience stress, emotional exhaustion, and burnout at very high rates compared with workers in other fields. Without social support from friends or other coworkers, many workers seek to leave the field or to reduce hours to cope with the emotional exhaustion of a demanding occupation. Consequently, many researchers have found that health care workers in particular need clear roles, professional autonomy, and social support to reduce burnout and turnover.

In one Canadian cancer center, a senior administrator sought to address some of these needs by creating a leadership team that could manage its own work in a multidisciplinary team environment. Team members would have professional autonomy and would provide social support to one another. Leaders volunteered or were chosen from each of the center’s main disciplines, such as oncology, surgery, nursing, and more. Organization development consultants were invited to lead workshops in which the team could develop cohesive trusting relationships and agree on working conditions that would reduce the potential for conflict among disciplines.

In a series of three 2-day workshops over 3 months, the team participated in a number of important activities. They did role-play and dramatic exercises in which they took on one another’s roles in order to be able to see how others see them.

They completed surveys of their personal working styles to understand their own communication and behavior patterns. The team learned problem-solving techniques, they clarified roles, and they established group goals.

Three months after the final workshop was conducted, the facilitators conducted interviews to assess the progress of the group. All of the participants reported a better sense of belonging, a feeling of trust and safety with the team, and a better understanding of themselves and others with whom they worked. One participant said about a coworker, “I felt that [the workshops] connected me far differently to [coworker] than I would have ever had an opportunity to do otherwise, you know in a normal work setting” (Black & Westwood, 2004, p. 584). The consultants noted that participants wanted to continue group development on an ongoing basis.

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Example 4: A Future Search Conference in a Northern California Community (Blue Sky Productions, 1996) Santa Cruz County is located in Northern California, about an hour south of San Francisco. In the 1960s, the county had approximately 25,000 residents in an agricultural region and in a small retirement community. In the late 1960s, the University of California, Santa Cruz opened its doors, and in the following years the county began to experience a demographic shift as people began to move to the area and real estate prices skyrocketed. By 1990, the population had reached 250,000 residents, and increasingly expensive real estate prices meant that many residents could no longer afford to live there. Affordable housing was especially a problem for the agricultural community. A local leadership group had convened several conferences but could never agree on an approach to the housing problem.

In the mid-1990s, a consortium of leaders representing different community groups decided to explore the problem further by holding a future search conference. They invited 72 diverse citizens to a 3-day conference not only to explore the problem of affordable housing but also to address other issues that they had in common. The citizen groups represented a cross-section of the community, from young to old, executives to farmworkers, and social services agencies. Attendees were chosen to try to mirror the community as a “vertical slice” of the population.

They called the conference “Coming Together as a Community Around Housing: A Search for Our Future in Santa Cruz County.”

At the conference, attendees explored their shared past as individuals and residents of the county. They discussed the history of the county and their own place in it. Next, they described the current state of the county and the issues that were currently being addressed by the stakeholder groups in attendance. The process was a collaborative one, as one attendee said, “What one person would raise as an issue, another person would add to, and another person would add to.” There were also some surprises as new information was shared. One county social services employee realized that “there were a couple of things that I contributed that I thought everyone in the county knew about, and [I] listen[ed] to people respond to my input, [and say] ‘oh, really?’” Finally, the attendees explored what they wanted to work on in their stakeholder groups. They described a future county environment 10 years out and presented scenarios that took a creative form as imaginary TV shows and board of supervisors meetings. Group members committed to action plans, including short- and long-term goals.

Eighteen months later, attendees had reached a number of important goals that had been discussed at the conference. Not only had they been able to increase funding for a farmworkers housing loan program and created a rental assistance fund, but they were on their way to building a $5.5 million low-income housing project.

In addition, participants addressed a number of nonhousing issues as well. They embarked on diversity training in their stakeholder groups, created a citizen action corps, invited other community members to participate on additional task force groups, and created a plan to revitalize a local downtown area. “Did the future search conference work?” one participant wondered. “No question about it. It provided a living model of democracy.”

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Example 5: A Long-Term Strategic Change Engagement (Sackmann, Eggenhofer-Rehart, & Friesl, 2009) ABA, a German trading company with 15,000 employees, embarked on a major strategic change initiative driven by stiff competition. A global expansion prompted the company to reorganize into a three-division structure. A decentralized shared services model, comprised of 14 new groups, was created for administrative departments that would now support internal divisions. To support the culture of the new organization, executives developed a mission and vision statement that explained the company’s new values and asked managers to cascade these messages to their staffs. This effort was kicked off and managed from the top of the organization.

The director of the newly formed shared services centers contacted external consultants, suspecting that a simple communication cascade to employees would not result in the behavioral changes needed in the new structure. The new administrative groups would have significant changes to work processes, and the lead managers of each of the 14 new groups would need assistance to put the new values and beliefs into practice. The consultants proposed an employee survey to gauge the beliefs and feelings of the staff and to provide an upward communication mechanism. Survey results were available to managers of each center, and the external consultants coached the managers through an interpretation of the results to guide self-exploration and personal development. Internal consultants worked with the managers of each of the new centers to facilitate a readout of the survey results with employees and take actions customized to the needs of each group. Consultants conducted workshops for managers to help them further develop personal leadership and communication skills, topics that the survey suggested were common areas of improvement across the management team. Over a period of 4 years, the cycle was repeated, using variations of the employee survey questions, a feedback step, and management development workshops covering new subjects each time.

Interviews and surveys conducted late in the process showed that employees had a positive feeling about change in general. Leaders reported noticing a more trusting relationship between employees and their managers characterized by more open communication. Center managers took the initiative to make regular and ongoing improvements to their units. The authors noted the need for a major change like this one to include multiple intervention targets. This organization experienced “changes in strategy, structure, management instruments, leadership, employee orientation, and the organization’s culture context” (p. 537), which required a broad set of surveys, coaching, and workshops to support. “These change supporting activities helped implement the change with lasting effect” (p. 537), they conclude.

As you can see from this and the previous examples, OD is concerned with a diverse variety of issues to address problems involving organizations, teams, and individuals. OD is also conducted in a diverse variety of organizations, including federal, state, and local governments (which are among the largest employers in the United States, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics), public sector

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organizations around the world, health care organizations, educational settings, and nonprofit and private enterprises. Interventions can involve a single individual, a small team (such as the cancer center team described above), multiple teams, or a whole organization. It can also consist of multiple targets of change, such as in the Vodaphone initiative that involved not only large-scale culture change but also the implementation of teams and individual coaching. OD can also deal with multiorganization efforts, such as that described in Santa Cruz County, or it can involve multiple national governments. The target of change can be something as seemingly simple as increasing employee involvement or developing coworker relationships, or it can be as potentially large as creating the vision or strategy of an entire organization or documenting the 10-year future of a large county.

What Organization Development Is Not Despite this seemingly expansive definition of what organization development is and what issues and problems it addresses, it is also limited. OD is not any of the following.

Management Consulting OD can be distinguished from management consulting in specific functional areas such as finance, marketing, corporate strategy, or supply chain management. It is also distinguished from information technology applications. Yet, OD is applicable to any of these areas. When organizations attempt conscious changes, whether it involves implementing a new IT system; changes in strategy, goals, or direction; or adapting to a new team leader, OD offers relevant processes and techniques to make the change function effectively. An OD practitioner would not likely use expertise in one of these content areas (for example, best practices in financial structures of supplier relationships or contemporary marketing analysis) to make recommendations about how an organization does this activity. Most management consulting also is not based on OD’s set of foundational values (a topic that we will take up in detail in Chapter 3). In Chapter 5 we will discuss OD consulting in particular and differentiate it from management consulting activities with which you may be familiar.

Training and Development While individual and organization learning is a part of OD and a key value we will discuss in a later chapter, OD work is not confined to training activities. OD is not generally the context in situations in which learning is the sole objective, such as learning a new skill, system, or procedure. OD deals with organizational change efforts that may or may not involve members of the organization needing to learn specific new skills or systems. Many training and development professionals are gravitating toward OD to enhance their skills in identifying the structural elements of organizations that need to be changed or enhanced for training and new skills to be effective. Other aspects of the training and development profession, however,

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such as needs assessment, course development, the use of technology, or on-the-job training, are not central to the job of the OD practitioner.

In addition, most training programs are developed for a large audience, often independent of how the program would be applied in any given organization.

While some OD interventions do incorporate training programs and skill building, OD is more centrally concerned with the context that would make a training program successful, such as management support, job role clarification, process design, and more. As Burke (2008) writes, “Individual development cannot be separated from OD, but to be OD, individual development must be in the service of or leverage for system-wide change, an integral aspect of OD’s definition” (p. 23).

Short Term OD is intended to address long-term change. Even in cases in which the intervention is carried out over a short period (such as the several-day workshops conducted at the cancer center described earlier), the change is intended to be a long-term or permanent one. OD efforts are intended to develop systemic changes that are long lasting. In the contemporary environment in which changes are constantly being made, this can be particularly challenging.

The Application of a Toolkit Many OD practitioners speak of the OD “toolkit.” It is true that OD does occasionally involve the application of an instrumented training or standard models, but it is also more than that. To confuse OD with a toolkit is to deny that it also has values that complement its science. It is more than a rigid procedure for moving an organization, team, or individual from point A to point B. It involves being attuned to the social and personal dynamics of the client organization that usually require flexibility in problem solving, not a standardized set of procedures or tools. In Chapter 3, we will discuss the values that underlie OD to better understand the fundamental concepts that explain how and why OD practitioners make the choices they do.

Who This Book Is For This book is for students, practitioners, and managers who seek to learn more about the process of organizational change following organization development values and practices. We will use the term organization development, as most academic audiences prefer, over the term organizational development, which seems to dominate spoken and written practitioner communication. We will also refer to the organization development practitioner, consultant, and change agent in this book as a single general audience, because these terms emphasize that OD is practiced by a large community that can include more than just internal and external OD consultants.

OD includes (and the book is written for) anyone who must lead organizational change as a part of his or her role. With the magnitude and frequency of organizational change occurring today, this encompasses a wide variety of roles and is an

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increasingly diverse and growing community. The OD practitioner can include the internal or external organization development consultant, but also managers and executives, human resources and training professionals, quality managers, project managers and information technology specialists, educators, health care administrators, directors of nonprofit organizations, and many more. We will also more frequently discuss organizational members than employees, which is a more inclusive term that includes volunteers in nonprofit groups and others who are connected to organizations but who may not have an employment relationship with them. The term also is intended to include not just leaders, executives, and managers but also employees at all levels.

Overview of the Book This book provides an overview of the content of organization development, including theories and models used by change agents and OD practitioners. It also explores the process by which OD is practiced. The objective of the book is to acquaint you with the field of OD and the process of organization development consulting. The goal is to develop your analytic, consulting, and practitioner skills so that you can apply the concepts of OD to real situations. We will simulate these consulting situations through six detailed case studies, which follow many of the skill development chapters, in which you will be able to immediately practice what you have learned in the chapter.

Chapters 2 through 5 will explore the foundations of the field, including its history, values, and an overview of the key concepts and research in organizational change. In these chapters you will learn how OD began as a field, how it has evolved over the past decades, and how most practitioners think of the field today.

In Chapter 3, we will discuss the underlying values and ethical beliefs that influence choices that practitioners must make in working with clients. Chapter 4 provides a foundation in research into organizational change from a systems perspective, a common way of thinking about organizations. We will also discuss a social construction perspective on organizational change. In this chapter you will be exposed to models of organizational systems and organizational change that have influenced the development of many OD interventions. In Chapter 5, we will define the role of the OD consultant, differentiating the OD consultant from other kinds of consultants, and describing the specific advantages and disadvantages to the OD consultant when the consultant is internal or external to the organization.

Beginning with Chapter 6, the book follows an action research and consulting model (entry, contracting, data gathering, data analysis/diagnosis, feedback, interventions, and evaluation). We will discuss the major actions that practitioners take in each of these stages and describe the potential pitfalls to the internal and external consultant. Chapter 6 describes the early stages of the consulting engagement, including entry and contracting. You will learn how a consultant contracts with a client and explores what problems the client is experiencing, how those problems are being managed, and how problems can be (re)defined for a client. In Chapter 7

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we will cover how practitioners gather data, as well as assess the advantages and disadvantages of various methods for gathering data about the organization. Chapter 8 describes what OD practitioners do with the data they have gathered by exploring the dynamics of the feedback and joint diagnosis processes. This stage of the consulting process is especially important as it constitutes the point at which the client and consultant define what interventions will best address the problems that have been described.

Chapter 9 begins by describing the most visible aspect of an OD engagement— the intervention. We will discuss the components of interventions and describe the decisions that practitioners must make in grappling with how to structure them for maximum effectiveness. Chapters 10 through 12 address the traditional OD practices with which most practitioners ought to be familiar, including interventions such as organization design, strategic planning, quality interventions, team building, survey feedback, individual instruments, and coaching and mentoring. These chapters also incorporate newer practices being used with increasing frequency, such as appreciative inquiry, future search, and Six Sigma. These interventions are organized according to the target of the intervention, whether it be the whole organization, multiple groups, single groups, or individuals. In Chapter 13 we will conclude our discussion of the OD process by exploring how organization development practitioners separate themselves from client engagements and evaluate the results of their efforts. In Chapter 14 we will discuss the applicability and relevance of OD to contemporary organizations, given trends in demographics, working conditions, and organizational environments.

Many chapters begin with an opening vignette and thought questions to set the stage for the topics covered in those chapters. Some of these vignettes present published case studies of successful and unsuccessful OD efforts. As you read the vignettes and the chapter, consider what factors made the case more or less successful and what lessons the practitioner may have learned from the experience. You may wish to find the published case and read it for additional details not presented in the vignette. Reading published cases can help you develop a deeper appreciation for the complexities of OD work and learn from the successes and struggles that others have experienced.

Following trends in the corporate world, ethical issues in OD are gaining the attention of academics, clients, and practitioners. While we will discuss values and ethics in Chapter 3, rather than leave ethical dilemmas to that chapter alone, we will also discuss ethical issues in organization development at relevant points throughout the book, when appropriate for the stage in the OD process being described.

Analyzing Case Studies The case studies included in this book are intended to help you learn the role and thought process of an OD consultant or change agent through realistic examples. By reading and analyzing case studies, you will actively participate in applying the theory and concepts of OD to complex, real-life situations that consultants find

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themselves in every day. These cases are all based in practitioners’ real experiences— names and some details have been changed to protect the client’s and practitioner’s anonymity. By stepping into a practitioner’s shoes, you will be challenged to make the tradeoffs and choices that managers and consultants are asked to make. The cases will help you develop the problem-solving and critical-thinking skills that are central to the value that a practitioner brings to a client. Ideally you can discuss these cases with others who have analyzed them as well, and together you can identify the central issues in the cases and debate the most appropriate response. In this way you will be assimilating knowledge that you have about organizations, change, human dynamics, and the concepts and theories of OD. You will learn the logic behind the choices that managers and practitioners make and you will gain practice in making your thought processes explicit. The cases in the book will build on one another in complexity, so you will need to integrate what you have learned from previous chapters as you analyze each case.

The case studies in this book are written as mini-plays or scenes to provide a richly detailed scenario in which you can imagine yourself playing a part, in contrast to many commonly published case studies in which a few short paragraphs provide all of the detail available for analysis. Since a good deal of OD and change management involves noticing and responding to the human and relational dynamics of a situation in addition to the task and content issues, the scenes in this book provide both in order to give you practice in becoming an observer of people during the process of organizational change. The cases in this book also are situated in a number of diverse types of organizations in which OD is practiced, including educational environments, health care and nonprofit organizations, and for-profit businesses. Each of these types of organizations brings with it unique challenges and opportunities for the OD practitioner.

Each case provides a slice of organizational life, constructed as a brief scene in which you can imagine yourself playing a part, but which will require your conscious thinking and reflection. Cases present situations with many options. As Ellet (2007) writes, “A case is a text that refuses to explain itself ” (p. 19). It requires you to take an active role to interpret it and discover its meaning. Fortunately, unlike the passage of time in real life, in written cases life is momentarily paused to give you the chance to consider a response. While you do not have the opportunity to gather additional data or ask questions of participants, you do have the ability to flip back a few pages, read the situation again, and contemplate. You can carefully consider alternate courses of action, weigh the pros and cons of each, and clarify why you would choose one option over another.

As a result of having to make these choices, you will hone your ability to communicate your rationale for your decisions. Classmates will make different choices, each with their own well-reasoned rationales. Through discussion you will sharpen your ability to solve problems, understanding the principles behind the decisions that you and your classmates have made. You will learn about how your own experiences shape your assumptions and approaches to problems. You will be challenged to develop your skills to provide evidence for your reasoning, defend your analyses, and explain your thinking in clear and concise ways for fellow practitioners

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and clients alike. You may find that these discussions prompt you to change your mind about the approach you would take, becoming convinced by a classmate’s well-reasoned proposal, or you may find that your reasoning persuades others that your approach has the greater advantages.

Regardless, you will learn that there is no single right answer at the back of the book or to be shared by your instructor after you have struggled. For some of the cases in this book, your instructor may share with you what happened after the case concluded. This information may provide support for the approach you would have taken, or it may make you think that your approach was incorrect. Instead of seeking the right or wrong answer, however, asking yourself whether your proposal was well-reasoned given the circumstances is more important than knowing the exact outcome of the case. While you have the opportunity to do so, use the occasion of the case study and the discussion to play with various alternatives. Here, the process may be more important than the outcome.

The following tips will help you get started with case study analysis.

1. Read the entire case first, and resist the temptation to come to any conclusions the first time you read it. Allow yourself to first gather all of the relevant data about the situation before you propose any solutions or make any judgments about what is happening or what the client needs to do.

2. Use the tools and methods outlined in each chapter to help you think through the issues presented by the case. You will find worksheets, models, and outlines that can assist you in identifying and categorizing problems, selecting and prioritizing interventions, and organizing ideas to respond to the client. Use charts and diagrams to map out organizational structures and underline key phrases and issues. Write questions that come to mind in the margins. Read the case multiple times to ensure that you have not missed a key detail that would indicate to a client that you had not been paying close attention.

3. Realize that like real life, case studies contain many extra details and describe multiple issues. Organizational life is messy and complex, and not all of these details are helpful or necessary to the consultant or change agent. A consultant helping a team redefine roles and responsibilities may be doing so in an environment in which the company has acquired a competitor or quarterly results were disappointing. Part of the practitioner’s role is to sort the useful primary information from the unnecessary secondary information (or information that is unnecessary for the immediate problem). This is part of the value of these case exercises and a logic and intuition that you will develop as your skills and experience grow. Ask yourself what the client is trying to achieve, what he or she has asked of you, and what the core issues and central facts are.

4. Similarly, in any response to a client or reaction to a case, resist the temptation to comment on everything. An OD practitioner can help to prioritize the most pressing issues and help the client sort through the complexities of organizational life. It could be that part of the reason the client has asked for help is that the number of possibilities for action are too overwhelming to decide what to do next.

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5. When you are prepared to write a response or an analysis, ask yourself whether you have addressed the central questions asked by the case and whether you have clearly stated the issues to the client. Once your response is written, could you send that, in its present form, to the client described in the case? In that regard, is the analysis professionally written and well organized to communicate unambiguously to the client? Will the client understand how and why you reached these conclusions?

6. As you write your analysis, ask yourself how you know any particular fact or interpretation to be true and whether you have sufficiently justified your interpretation with actual data. Instead of boldly stating that “managers are not trained for their roles,” you could write, “Only 2 of 10 managers had attended a management training course in the past 5 years, leading me to conclude that management training has not been given a high priority.” The latter uses data and makes the interpretation explicit; the former is likely to invite criticism or defensiveness from a client. This does not mean that directness is not appropriate, only that it must follow from the evidence.

We will describe the considerations of the feedback process in depth in this book.

7. When you have finished your own thinking and writing about the case, and after you have had the opportunity to discuss the case and options for action with classmates, take the time to write down your reflections from the experience (Ellet, 2007). What did you learn? What principles might apply for the next time you are confronted with these choices?

Summary Today’s organizations are experiencing an incredible amount of change.

Organization development is a field of academic study and professional practice that uses social and behavioral science knowledge to develop interventions that help organizations and individuals change successfully. It is a field practiced in almost all kinds of organizations that you can imagine, from education to health care, from government to small and large businesses. Changes that OD practitioners address are diverse as well, addressing organizational structures and strategies, team effectiveness, and much more. OD is not management consulting or training and development, and it is neither short term nor the mere application of a standard procedure or toolkit. OD practitioners can include many kinds of people for whom organizational change is a priority, such as managers and executives, project managers, and organizational members in a variety of roles.

For Further Reading Beckhard, R. (1969). Organization development: Strategies and models. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Burke, W. W. (2008). A contemporary view of organization development. In T. G. Cummings (Ed.), Handbook of organization development (pp. 13–38). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

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ORGANIZATION DEVELOPMENT Egan, T. M. (2002). Organization development: An examination of definitions and dependent variables. Organization Development Journal, 20(2), 59–71.

Marshak, R. J. (2006). Organization development as a profession and a field. In B. B. Jones & R. Brazzel (Eds.), The NTL handbook of organization development and change: Principles, practices, and perspectives (pp. 13–27). San Francisco: Pfeiffer.

Attachment B Organizational Development Problems & Proposals

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