Organizational change involves moving from the known to the unknown. Because the future is uncertain and may adversely affect people’s competencies, worth, and cop- ing abilities, organization members generally do not support change unless compelling reasons convince them to do so. Similarly, organizations tend to be heavily invested in the status quo, and they resist changing it in the face of uncertain future benefits.
Consequently, a key issue in planning for action is how to motivate commitment to organizational change. As shown in Figure 10.1, this requires attention to two related tasks: creating readiness for change and overcoming resistance to change.
Creating Readiness for Change
One of the more fundamental axioms of OD is that people’s readiness for change depends on creating a felt need for change. This involves making people so dissatisfied with the status quo that they are motivated to try new work processes, technologies, or ways of behaving. Creating such dissatisfaction can be difficult, as anyone knows who has tried to lose weight, stop smoking, or change some other habitual behavior.
Generally, people and organizations need to experience deep levels of hurt before they will seriously undertake meaningful change. For example, IBM, GM, and Sears experienced threats to their very survival before they undertook significant change programs. The following three methods can help generate sufficient dissatisfaction to produce change:
Sensitize organizations to pressures for change. Innumerable pressures for change operate both externally and internally to organizations. As described in Chapter 1, modern organizations face unprecedented environmental pressures to change themselves, including heavy foreign competition, rapidly changing tech- nology, and the draw of global markets. Internal pressures to change include new leadership, poor product quality, high production costs, and excessive employee 1.
166 PART 2 The Process of Organization Development
absenteeism and turnover. Before these pressures can serve as triggers for change, however, organizations must be sensitive to them. The pressures must pass beyond an organization’s threshold of awareness if managers are to respond to them.
Many organizations, such as Kodak, Polaroid, and Northwest Airlines, set their thresholds of awareness too high and neglected pressures for change until those pressures reached disastrous levels.6
Organizations can make themselves more sensitive to pressures for change by encouraging leaders to surround themselves with devil’s advocates; by cultivating external networks that comprise people or organizations with different perspec- tives and views; by visiting other organizations to gain exposure to new ideas and methods; and by using external standards of performance, such as competitors’
progress or benchmarks, rather than the organization’s own past standards of per- formance.7 At Wesley Long Community Hospital, in Greensboro, North Carolina, for example, managers visited the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Marconi Commerce Systems’
high-involvement plant, and other hospitals known for high quality to gain insights about revitalizing their own organization.
Reveal discrepancies between current and desired states. In this approach to generating a felt need for change, information about the organization’s cur- rent functioning is gathered and compared with desired states of operation. (See
“Creating a Vision,” below, for more information about desired future states.) These desired states may include organizational goals and standards, as well as a general vision of a more desirable future state.8 Significant discrepancies between actual and ideal states can motivate organization members to initiate corrective changes, particularly when members are committed to achieving those ideals. A major goal of diagnosis, as described in Chapters 5 and 6, is to provide members with feedback about current organizational functioning so that the information can be compared with goals or with desired future states. Such feedback can ener- gize action to improve the organization. At Waste Management, Sunbeam, and Banker’s Trust, for example, financial statements had reached the point at which it was painfully obvious that drastic renewal was needed.9
Convey credible positive expectations for the change. Organization mem- bers invariably have expectations about the results of organizational changes. The positive approaches to planned change described in Chapter 2 suggest that these expectations can play an important role in generating motivation for change.10 Expectations can serve as a self-fulfilling prophecy, leading members to invest energy in change programs that they expect will succeed. When members expect success, they are likely to develop greater commitment to the change process and to direct more energy into the constructive behaviors needed to implement it.11 The key to achieving these positive effects is to communicate realistic, positive expecta- tions about the organizational changes. Research suggests that information about why the change is occurring, how it will benefit the organization, and how people will be involved in the design and implementation of the change was most helpful.12 Organization members also can be taught about the benefits of positive expectations and be encouraged to set credible positive expectations for the change program.
Overcoming Resistance to Change
Change can generate deep resistance in people and in organizations, thus making it difficult, if not impossible, to implement organizational improvements.13 At a per- sonal level, change can arouse considerable anxiety about letting go of the known and moving to an uncertain future.14 People may be unsure whether their existing skills and contributions will be valued in the future, or may have significant questions about whether they can learn to function effectively and to achieve benefits in the 2.
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new situation. At the organization level, resistance to change can come from three sources.15 Technical resistance comes from the habit of following common procedures and the consideration of sunk costs invested in the status quo. Political resistance can arise when organizational changes threaten powerful stakeholders, such as top execu- tive or staff personnel, or call into question the past decisions of leaders.16 Organization change often implies a different allocation of already scarce resources, such as capital, training budgets, and good people. Finally,cultural resistance takes the form of systems and procedures that reinforce the status quo, promoting conformity to existing values, norms, and assumptions about how things should operate.
There are at least three major strategies for dealing with resistance to change:17 Empathy and support. A first step in overcoming resistance is learning how people are experiencing change. This strategy can identify people who are having trouble accepting the changes, the nature of their resistance, and possible ways to overcome it, but it requires a great deal of empathy and support. It demands a willingness to suspend judgment and to see the situation from another’s perspec- tive, a process called active listening. When people feel that those people who are responsible for managing change are genuinely interested in their feelings and perceptions, they are likely to be less defensive and more willing to share their concerns and fears. This more open relationship not only provides useful informa- tion about resistance but also helps establish the basis for the kind of joint problem solving needed to overcome barriers to change.
Communication. People resist change when they are uncertain about its conse- quences. Lack of adequate information fuels rumors and gossip and adds to the anxiety generally associated with change. Effective communication about changes and their likely results can reduce this speculation and allay unfounded fears. It can help members realistically prepare for change. However, communication is also one of the most frustrating aspects of managing change. Organization mem- bers constantly receive data about current operations and future plans as well as informal rumors about people, changes, and politics. Managers and OD practi- tioners must think seriously about how to break through this stream of informa- tion. One strategy is to make change information more salient by communicating through a new or different channel. If most information is delivered through memos and emails, then change information can be delivered through meetings and presentations. Another method that can be effective during large-scale change is to deliberately substitute change information for normal operating information.
This sends a message that changing one’s activities is a critical part of one’s job.
Participation and involvement. One of the oldest and most effective strategies for overcoming resistance is to involve organization members directly in planning and implementing change. Participation can lead both to designing high- quality changes and to overcoming resistance to implementing them.18 Members can provide a diversity of information and ideas, which can contribute to making the innovations effective and appropriate to the situation. They also can identify pitfalls and barriers to implementation. Involvement in planning the changes increases the likelihood that members’ interests and needs will be accounted for during the intervention. Consequently, participants will be committed to implementing the changes because doing so will suit their interests and meet their needs. Moreover, for people having strong needs for involvement, the act of participation itself can be motivating, leading to greater effort to make the changes work.19
Application 10.1 describes how an OD consultant helped the sexual violence preven- tion unit of the Minnesota Department of Health generate commitment to a change process when the unit’s leader left shortly after the change process began.20
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Motivating Change in the Sexual Violence Prevention Unit of Minnesota’s Health
Department
Addressing the prevention of sexual violence is a complex challenge. Unlike cigarette smoking or automobile accidents, sexual violence is not only a health issue, but a social issue connected to people’s attitudes, beliefs, norms, and taboos. The sexual violence prevention unit of Minnesota’s health department decided to undertake a five-year strategic planning effort to address the “primary prevention” of sexual violence. Primary preven- tion is defined as activities that focus on preventing sexual violence before it occurs. While there have been numerous successful investments focused on dealing with victims or addressing what happens after an assault, there was a clear need for primary prevention.
There were two driving forces for the plan. First, the Centers for Disease Control had identified sexual violence as a key health issue and was providing grants to states for the development of primary prevention plans. Second, Minnesota was a recognized leader in sexual violence prevention work. The health department worked closely with the Minnesota Coalition Against Sexual Violence (MNCASA), a primary recipient of state funding, and other stakeholders who were working on sex- ual violence prevention. This coalition had been meeting for several years to develop education in primary prevention and to engage in a cross-sector dialogue on the issue.
The two primary objectives of the project were to:
• Create a strategic plan for the primary pre- vention of sexual violence in the state of Minnesota.
• Mobilize a broad range of individuals and organi- zations to take action in the primary prevention of sexual violence.
This application describes the activities associ- ated with motivating change within the sexual violence prevention unit to create the strategic planning process. Application 10.3 describes the activities associated with managing the various stakeholders involved with this change and the large-group intervention that kicked off the stra- tegic planning and implementation effort.
Beginning the Project
The sexual violence prevention unit hired a local OD consulting firm to facilitate the strategic planning process. Everyone in the unit believed that strategic planning was the next right step.
Community members wanted action. In fact, they had stopped meeting in a dialogue forum because they felt they were not making progress in address- ing the issue systemically or strategically.
The project got off to a rough start. The day after the OD consultant began working with the unit, the unit director resigned. She had been a major force in bringing the project to fruition, and her departure represented a key challenge for the consultants. In the interim, the unit’s program director and adminis- trator stepped in to provide content leadership with the help of the director of MNCASA. Her departure also created a strong need to mobilize the members of the unit and to recruit the necessary external stake- holders with content knowledge and community reputation to galvanize action in the community.
To focus the key stakeholders on the change effort, the OD consultants met with the departing director to identify a range of community stakeholders to interview. The interviews were critical in building the consultants’ knowledge of the issue and quickly establishing relationships with key stakeholders.
They also helped identify community members who could provide leadership on the project.
Motivating Commitment
As part of the internal effort to reinforce commit- ment to the change process, a steering committee was formed. It consisted of project leaders from the health department, the OD consultants, and six community members. This committee was respon- sible for identifying and recruiting other internal and external stakeholders to participate in the planning process. They also served as advisors to the OD consultants on selecting the best forum to conduct the planning, reviewing draft agendas, and providing feedback on plan drafts. They were asked to convene for two meetings as well as provide input on plans and written reports virtually.
application 10.1
All of the steering committee members were volunteers recruited by the project leaders and OD consultants after the initial interviews. The OD consultants were part of the identification and recruitment process because they had formed relationships with several of the members through previous work and had established strong rap- port through their interviews. The community members of the committee were chosen not only because of their expertise and history in the field, locally and nationally, but because they had good process skills. Another criterion for participation was diversity. It was important that this group include members who could speak for underrepresented groups, such as Native
American, Hispanic, African American, and youth segments. Everyone who was asked to participate wanted to be part of this effort.
Despite this high level of commitment to the proj- ect, time was a big constraint. To use time well, the consultants asked for two meetings. In between meetings, they drafted proposals for the group to react to, rather than asking members to decide on the work to be done by the group. When members could not be at a meeting, the consultants got their input individually, both before and after the meet- ing. Because of their commitment to prevention, all of the steering committee members stayed in close contact with the consultants and responded promptly to all requests.