Managing Change for Organizations

Organizational development is a deliberately planned effort to increase an organization's relevance and viability.

LEARNING OBJECTIVE

• Explain the role of organizational development in leadership and organizational change

KEY POINTS

• Organizational development (OD) is an ongoing, systematic process of implementing effective organizational change.
• The purpose of organizational development is to address the evolving needs of successful organizations.
• Organizational development is often facilitated with the assistance of a "catalyst" or "change agent" such as an effective or influential leader.
• An important role of a leader is to analyze and assess the effectiveness of this developmental process and motivate the organization to achieve developmental targets.

TERMS

• viability
  The ability to live or to succeed.
  
  
• catalyst
  Someone or something that encourages progress or change.

Organization development (OD) is a deliberately planned effort to increase an organization's relevance and viability. Vasudevan has referred to OD as a systemic learning and development strategy intended to change the basics of beliefs, attitudes, and relevance of an organization's values and structure. This process helps the organization to better absorb disruptive technologies, market opportunities, and ensuing challenges and chaos. Essentially, organizational development is the framework for a change process that is designed to produce desirable and positive results for all stakeholders and the environment.

The Nature of Organizational Development

Organizational development is a lifelong, built-in mechanism to improve an organization internally. This is often done with the assistance of a "change agent" or "catalyst" who enables appropriate theories and techniques from applied behavioral sciences, anthropology, sociology, and phenomenology. The terms "change agent" and "catalyst" suggest a leader who is engaged in transformation leadership as opposed to management (management being a more incremental or efficiency-based change methodology).

Although behavioral science 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 have also emerged as OD catalysts. These emergent perspectives view the organization as the holistic interplay of a number of systems, all of which impact the processes and outputs of the entire organization.
 

Applications of Organizational Development

The purpose of OD is to address the evolving needs of successful organizations. It represents a concerted collaboration of internal and external experts in the field to discover the processes an organization can use to become more effective.

Organizational development aims to improve an organization's capacity to handle its internal and external functioning and relationships. This includes improving interpersonal and group processes; communication; the organization's ability to cope with problems; decision-making processes; leadership styles; conflict and trust; and cooperation among organizational members.

Weisbord

Weisbord presents a six-box model for understanding – and thereby changing and improving – an organization:

1. Purposes: Are employees clear about the organization's mission, purpose, and goals? Do they support the organization's purpose?
2. Structure: How is the organization's work divided? Is there an adequate fit between the purpose and the internal structure?
3. Relationships: What are the relationships between individuals, units, or departments that perform different tasks? What are the relationships between the people and the requirements of their jobs?
4. Rewards: For what actions does the organization formally reward or punish its members?
5. Leadership: Does leadership watch for "blips" among the other areas and maintain balance among them?
6. Helpful mechanisms: Do planning, control, budgeting, and other information systems help organization members accomplish their goals?

Phases of Organizational Change: Lewin

Kurt Lewin's phases of change (unfreezing, change, and freezing) describe how people react and adapt to change.
Lewin's description of the process of change involves three steps:

1. Unfreezing: Faced with a dilemma or issue, the individual or group becomes aware of a need to change.
2. Changing: The situation is diagnosed and new models of behavior are explored and tested.
3. Refreezing: Application of new behavior is evaluated, and if it proves to be reinforcing, the behavior is adopted.

Change is a fundamental component of any organization looking to continuously improve and evolve. A few researchers and academics have determined how to best model and present methods of change for managing employees. Kurt Lewin was one of these academics and was known as one of the leaders of organizational psychology.

Kurt Lewin: Lewin was an influential behavioral and organizational psychologist who proposed the Phases of Change Model.

The Three Phases of Change

This early model developed by Lewin describes change as a three-stage process of unfreezing, change, and freezing. In this Phases of Change Model, Lewin emphasizes that change is not a series of individual processes but rather one that flows from one process to the next.

The first stage (unfreezing) involves overcoming inertia and dismantling the existing mind set. It involves getting over the initial defense mechanisms that people exhibit to avoid making a change. People eventually realize that change is necessary and urgent, and this realization allows them to move on to the next stage.

In the second stage, the actual change occurs. This is typically a period of confusion and transition in which people are unsure about the change and what may happen in the future. People are aware that the old ways are being challenged, but they do not yet have a clear picture as to what these ways will be replaced with. During this stage, an organization's leaders need to focus on clearly communicating to employees the reasons for change and the steps needed to achieve it.

Lewin labeled the third and final stage freezing, though it may be useful to think of this stage as "refreezing." During this stage, the new mindset of the change begins to become the standard, and people's comfort levels return to normal. Many people criticize this component of Lewin's model, arguing that there is never time for people to comfortably adapt to change in the fast-paced world of today.

Although some managers still use Lewin's model, its most important contribution is the idea that change should be thought of as a process instead of individual stages. This is important for understanding how employees may react to change in the workplace and why some may adapt more quickly to change than others.

Effectiveness of Organizational Development

The efficacy of organizational development is predicated on the adaptability of the organization and the overall successful integration of new ideas and strategies within an existing framework. Resistance to change is a fundamental organizational problem as all organizations have a degree of general inertia. This is further complicated by the difficulty in quantitatively measuring changes in areas that are generally intangible (i.e., culture).

To remedy this, organizations pursuing OD must set clear and measurable objectives prior to committing to a change initiative. An important role of the leader is to analyze and assess the effectiveness of this developmental process and motivate the organization to achieve developmental targets.