Page 90 - Managing Change in Organizations

CarnCh04v3.qxd 3/30/07 4:16 PM Page 73

Emergent approaches to change
options made organizing work teams into ‘semi-autonomous work groups’ easier.
The groups were also shown to be more likely to be associated with work seen by
employees to be more meaningful, more satisfying and likely to be more effective
in terms of indicators like absenteeism. Actually a careful reading of the book
reveals that this idea of organizational choice was not activated within the period
studied but rather that the research looked at two stages in the level of mecha-
nization. That said, the idea evolved into the notion that you might take any given
technology and seek to design or redesign the jobs involved to be more meaning-
ful. Out of this emerged the ‘job design’ field and in the 1980s the managerial com-
petence movement. Both were efforts to design roles around both the demands of
the tasks to be performed and what we know about human attitudes, motivation
and capabilities.
Other approaches within this body of work include ‘open systems theory’, see
Checkland (1986) and the systems dynamic approach. The latter comprises work
aimed at modelling social systems, made famous by the work of Meadows (1972)
and recently applied to the field of organization change by Rieley (2001). Systems
dynamics provides the analytical means of modelling social systems and can
allow the study of various design options when rethinking an organization. The
focus is largely on how to choose rather than on how to change but clearly the
process of choice is part of change and the fuller evaluation of options helps us
avoid ‘unintended consequences’.

Emergent approaches to change

Finally, Collins (2001) has brought forward a model of organization and
change which represents a significant step forward in the literature. It goes
beyond most linear models without losing the step-by-step logic inherent in
them. He distinguishes ‘great’ from ‘good’ companies, identifying as great
those companies which have outperformed their sector peers and competitors
on financial indicators, such as share price, over a period of 20 years and by
an order of magnitude of between four and twentyfold. He was able to iden-

tify 11 such companies. In this ‘Good to Great’ model there are two stages, build-
up and breakthrough.
The focus therefore is not on a particular change programme no matter how
extensive or strategic, but rather on the characteristics and processes associated with
achieving breakthrough change to sustained competitive advantage. This model
therefore overcomes one of the fundamental problems associated with the change
literature, that of viewing any specific change in isolation from other changes going
on in the organization at the same time. Each stage comprises the resolution of three
fundamental issues. These are presented in the model diagram as sequential steps
but we prefer to take them as issues to be resolved, to a large extent in parallel.
1 Build-up stage – within which you need to appoint, nurture and encourage
‘level 5 leaders’. These are leaders who combine leadership qualities alongside
a willingness to acknowledge personal limitations. It represents a counterpoint
to the notion of the charismatic leader but not a rejection of the idea. Thus
‘level 5 leaders’ may well have charisma. Ultimately the notion is that leaders
73