Page 88 - Managing Change in Organizations

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Linear approaches
3 Developing a vision and strategy.
4 Communicating the ‘change vision’.
5 Empowering employees for broad-based action.
6 Generating short-term wins.
7 Consolidating gains and producing more change.
8 Anchoring new changes in the culture.
Clearly no unitary view here. Creating a guiding coalition is clearly a ‘political
process’ and ‘anchoring change’ clearly requires a recognition of the social con-
text of particular changes.
Bullock and Balton (1985) offer a four-phase model embracing exploration,
planning, action and integration with the latter phase being of relevance here
because they define it as integrating changes within existing organizational
arrangements and note the importance of increasingly not having to rely on con-
sultants. They also make much of the processes for diffusing successful aspects of
change throughout the organization, a concern shared by Kelman, see page 65.
Cummings and Huse (1989) support this model but also build on the work of
French and Bell (1995) in identifying the new organizational practice, known as
organizational development (OD). Thus ‘organizations are being reinvented . . .
the rules of the game are being rewritten . . . the nature of organizations is chang-
ing’ and so there is a need to broaden attempts to manage change beyond the
level of individuals and groups.
Burnes (2004) notes that OD practitioners have developed their approaches
along three main themes:

1 With the advent of the job design approach in Europe and the USA and the
emergence of socio-technical systems theory (see below) OD practitioners came
to see that they needed to adopt an organization-wide perspective. Although it
ought to be added that other changes may have forced that issue. Thus the
organization change focus of the literature may well have moved from a depart-
mental/divisional focus, in the period 1950–1980, to an organization-wide or
even sector-wide landscape since, just as the idea of the value chain has con-

centrated attention across organizations and therefore has demanded a cross-
silo orientation.
2 This has lead to a focus on culture change programmes and on other organiza-
tion-wide interventions, for example Total Quality Management, Kaizen, Six
Sigma and others. Few, if any, large organizations and many smaller ones now
fail to conduct attitude surveys of all employees on a regular basis and increas-
ingly customer attitudes are also regularly surveyed. In turn this has lead to a
growing concern for learning and knowledge management as organizations
have sought better means of both capturing and making sense of data on per-
formance issues.
3 In particular, OD practitioners have adopted the action research approach as a
basis for achieving change in client organizations. It is worth noting that OD
practitioners have been primarily concerned with issues of organizational
effectiveness (see Argyris, 1990) and organizational health. They have typically

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