Page 137 - Managing Change in Organizations

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8 Sustaining organizational

effectiveness

Introduction

Change creates challenges for us all. It brings stress and anxiety as well as oppor-
tunities and the possibility for optimism. We have already seen that effective
organizational structures are more conducive to change. It is easier to implement
change in a more, rather than less, effective setting. Moreover, organizational
culture and management style have an important effect by creating a climate
supportive of change. In this chapter we turn to three related issues. First, we
examine the blockages to effective change. These operate at individual, group
and organizational levels. Second, we develop the notion that effective change
demands learning. Moreover, effective learning through change requires specific
situational conditions (to minimize or avoid the blockages) and a personal and
managerial style appropriate to learning and encouraging others to learn. Finally,
we examine some ideas on the characteristics of effective organizational struc-
tures and designs.

Blocks to problem solving and change

Systematic models of the change process abound. But the issue in planning change
is about how to generate creative solutions to what are generally novel problems.
We argue that, generally speaking, there is no shortage of ideas about how to
reorganize, deal with problems, create new markets and so on. What is usually
missing is the framework and support appropriate for encouraging the emer-
gence of creative solutions. I will now deal with a range of ‘blocks’ to creative
problem solving as a means of looking at practical ways of organizing and sus-
taining the process of planning change.
It is easy enough to say that management support is a key to innovation. We
now take this a stage further to consider some of the blocks to problem solving
in order that we can better understand how to manage this process. The ideas
listed below are from Adams (1987).

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