Four Foundations of Organizational Change
In 1996, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch hired a new editor, Cole Campbell, to address declining readership and increased competition. Among the changes instituted in the newsroom was a shift away from reporters being assigned to beats and toward journalistic reporting teams. The staff was generally enthusiastic and optimistic that this change would be a positive one that would increase the paper’s quality, and they welcomed the team-based governance structure. The vision was that teams comprising members from the news and business divisions would collaborate on customer-focus and problem-solving initiatives to improve the paper. As the change was instituted, however, morale declined. Several mid-level editor and reporter positions were eliminated or restructured, and both reporters and editors had to reapply for jobs as team members or leaders in the new structure. Many staff members were frustrated that they were not consulted or involved in making the changes successful. Soon reporters began to dislike working in teams and declared that nothing had actually changed in the quality of the paper. Many award-winning and highly respected journalists left the paper voluntarily, citing the changes in the newsroom. In 2000, Campbell resigned. Circulation had declined from 320,000 to less than 295,000 during his 4-year tenure (Gade & Perry, 2003).
What could have been done differently to make this change successful?
What factors do you think contribute to making a successful change?
As you have no doubt experienced, achieving change is difficult. This story of organizational change at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch has likely been replicated at countless organizations. While it may be tempting to blame the leader and to dismiss failed attempts as yet another example of poorly managed change, it is beneficial to understand what happened in situations like this one and what other explanations are possible. They can teach us about where attempts at change go wrong and how organizational change should be managed differently.
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As we have discussed in previous chapters, organization development (OD) was primarily concerned early on with incremental changes that organizations could experience through interventions that targeted individual development. In recent years, with an emphasis on organizational effectiveness, OD has directed attention toward larger-scale and strategic change. Organizational change is the context (and purpose) of OD work, and a key competency of OD professionals is understanding the nature of organizational change, including what factors help to make changes succeed and what factors cause them to fail. In this chapter we will explore the nature of organizational change, including how researchers and practitioners think about change. We will explore the levels and characteristics of changes that organizations seek to make, and we will look at the research and writings of scholars and practitioners that develop theoretical models for how changes occur, as well as the fundamental issues that make changes successful.
To do that, we will also delve briefly into organizational theory. We will discuss two ways of looking at organizations: as systems and as they are socially constructed. The organization-as-system model has evolved from general systems theory over the past 50 to 60 years. Organizations-as-socially-constructed is a relatively more recent evolution of organizational theory, becoming prominent in the past 20 to 30 years. While these approaches are contradictory in some respects, containing some fundamentally different assumptions at their core, these ways of looking at organizations offer useful and different insights. They suggest approaches to organizational change that can help practitioners as they interpret how to best help a client achieve change in a particular organization. As you learn about these perspectives and models of organizational change in this chapter, keep in mind the practical challenges faced by those who lead organizational change and whether there is one perspective or approach that resonates more with you and your experiences.
You may be wondering why we need to delve into such theoretical detail just to understand how to manage organizational change at a practical level. The answer is that our approach to change depends on the underlying assumptions and beliefs that we have about how organizations work. In other words, “The way change facilitators think about causes of change determines how they contract, assess, intervene, and evaluate during their interactions with client organizations” (Olson & Eoyang, 2001, p. 7). As we have noted in previous chapters, it is important for OD practitioners to be conscious and intentional about the choices they make and to avoid adopting an intervention or model simply because it is fashionable. By learning more about the assumptions behind the models, you will be a more thoughtful and successful practitioner of organizational change.
Levels and Characteristics of Organizational Change
When we talk about organizational change, we are referring to many different kinds of changes that occur at many levels. Changes can occur at the individual level when people learn new skills or develop new ways of working through mentoring, coaching, or education and training. Changes can occur at the group or team level as teams develop new ways of working with one another, define their goals and objectives, and learn ways of addressing conflict. Groups can also learn how to work more effectively with other groups (intergroup change) to solve problems or address interdependencies. Changes occur at the organizational level through the development of new strategies and processes, visions for a new desired future, and major system practices that affect all organizational members. Changes can also occur at suprasystem levels, where multiple organizations are implicated. These can involve changes, for example, between multiple organizations (such as mergers and acquisitions); between organizations and government agencies; or between cities, states, or nations.
Practitioners and scholars have noticed that organizational changes differ on a number of dimensions. Changes vary in several ways:
1. Planning. Organizational change can be planned or unplanned. Organizational members can be conscious and intentional about the changes that they want to make, often due to environmental factors, strategic or market needs, or other influences. Changes can also be unplanned, perhaps in response to an immediate threat or crisis. Weick (2000) contrasts planned changes with emergent changes, which are the “ongoing accommodations, adaptations, and alterations that produce fundamental change without a priori intentions to do so” (p. 237). Organization development as a field has primarily been concerned with the successful implementation of planned organizational change (Beckhard, 1969) or intentional change programs developed intentionally to improve the organization or address a deficiency.
2. Magnitude. OD literature differentiates between first-order and second-order change (Watzlawick, Weakland, & Fisch, 1974). First-order change consists of “incremental modifications that make sense within an established framework or method of operating,” and second-order change is defined as transformational changes that “are modifications in the frameworks themselves” (Bartunek & Moch, 1987, p. 484). First-order changes tend to be alterations or changes to existing practices rather than a rethinking or reinvention of the practice. Implementation of a computer system that simply automates existing work practices is an example of first-order change, where existing work practices are modified within the existing understanding of how the work is done, maintaining its current purposes, objectives, and processes. First-order change reflects an evolution of existing definitions rather than a revolution or redefinition. Rethinking how the entire organization used the computer system, including redefining roles, processes, values, and implicit meanings, would be considered second-order change. Because second-order change tends to reflect a more substantial shift, some refer to this type of change as “organizational transformation” (Bartunek & Louis, 1988). Chapman (2002) writes that, historically, most OD models reflect concerns with first-order change rather than second-order change. Others refer to differences in magnitude of organizational change by the labels transactional or transformational (Burke & Litwin, 1992), evolutionary
