Page 250 - Managing Change in Organizations

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Managerial skills for effective organizational change
sustained, and then dominate decision making and action, trivializes the prob-
lem of understanding organizational politics.
Lee and Lawrence (1985) suggest that ‘over and above “dominant coalitions”
and “strategic choice” we must study . . . the political situation and political activ-
ity, and accept that there will be many interest groups influencing structure . . .
as they push towards their own goals’. Whether they prefer a pluralist view (see-
ing interest groups of equivalent power) is not clear. They suggest the adoption of
a ‘radical’ view. Such a ‘radical’ view involves making no assumptions that organ-
izations have goals, over which management have the right to decide. Moreover,
no interest group has any a priori rights, although Lee and Lawrence accept that
interest groups might be assumed to have such rights, either by themselves or by
others. No set of values is judged as either ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. One is tempted to
add that if we suggest that people assume that organizations do have goals, and
act accordingly, then the confusion created by these definitions becomes almost
complete.
Individual behaviour is viewed as the impetus to all organized activity and
emerges from the pursuit of personal interests and goals. Individual behaviour,
they say, is essentially active and rational rather than passive, irrational or emo-
tional. Conflict is the very stuff of organizational life. This seems overly simplis-
tic. The distinction between the rational and the irrational has been replaced by
the notion of ‘multiple rationalities’ (see Weick, 1979). Rationality is in the eye
of the beholder. While there is much conflict in organizations, all have experi-
enced situations where the absence of conflict is even more worthy of attention.
As Lukes (1974) has made clear, one form of power is that of limiting the ‘polit-
ical’ agenda such that particular issues or choices are not recognized as being
important and are therefore precluded from consideration.
The world of organizational politics is characterized by structures of interests,
goals, power and status which are inherently unstable. This does not mean that
a given political order (e.g. the power of a dominant coalition) will be over-
turned. Rather, it seems likely that in a world of changing markets, technology,
social ties, population, values and beliefs and politics, the political order in an
organization will be necessarily unstable. To understand behaviour in organiza-

tions we must understand how that order is sustained or overturned. This may
have less to do with the ebb and flow of individual goals and interests at the
microlevel and more to do with how a particular organization’s problems (say, in
a declining market) are conceived, discussed and assessed. This means trying to
understand how such a problem is approached through analysis, discussion, the
production of reports and papers and so on. Accountants, engineers, marketing
and production personnel will be involved. Thus, different professional perspec-
tives will be employed. The emergence of an approach, whether to develop new
markets, disinvest, launch new products, seek a higher market share or whatever,
does not flow solely from the ‘facts’ but, rather, from a process in which profes-
sional, departmental and individual perspectives, attitudes and interests are
involved. Pettigrew (1985) argues for just such an approach. Interest groups have
different goals, time scales, values and problem-solving styles. Different interest
groups have different rationalities. Change processes in organizations may be

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