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MANAGING CHANGE IN SELF AND OTHERS We now look at some of the factors that arise when you as a manager are required to manage change within your organization. We will:
• discuss individual and group propensity for change; • introduce the work of Edgar Schein and his suggestions for managing change; • describe some of the ways that change can be thwarted; • identify how managers or change agents can help others to change.
RESPONSES TO CHANGE Those who let it happen. Those who make it happen. Those who wonder what happened.
Anon
Propensity for change
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Figure 1.12 Five factors in responding to change
We have isolated five factors, shown in Figure 1.12, that have an influence on an individual’s response to change. As a manager of change you will need to pay attention to these five areas if you wish to achieve positive responses to change:
• The nature of the change varies. Changes can be externally imposed or internally generated. They can be evolutionary or revolutionary in nature. They can be routine or one-off. They can be mundane or transformative. They can be about expansion or contraction. Different types of change can provoke different attitudes and different behaviours.
• The consequences of the change are significant. For whose benefit are the changes seen to be (employees, customers, the community, the shareholders, the board)? Who will be the winners and who will be the losers?
• The organizational history matters too. This means the track record of how the organization has handled change in the past (or how the acquiring organization is perceived), what the prevailing culture is, what the capacity of the organization is in terms of management expertise and resources to manage change effectively, and what the future, beyond the change, is seen to hold.
• The personality type of the individual is a major determining factor in how she or he responds to change. The Myers-Briggs type of the individual (reviewed earlier) can give us an indication of how an individual will respond to change. People’s motivating forces are also important – for example, are they motivated by power, status, money or affiliation and inclusion?
• The history of an individual can also give us clues as to how he or she might respond. By history we mean previous exposure and responses to change, levels of knowledge, skills and experience the individual has, areas of stability in his or her life and stage in his or her career. For example an individual who has previously experienced redundancy might re-experience the original trauma and upheaval regardless of how well the current one is handled. Or he or she may have acquired sufficient resilience and determination from the previous experience to be able to take this one in his or her stride.
Schein’s model of transformative change
Edgar Schein has been a leading researcher and practitioner in the fields of individual, organizational and cultural change over the last 20 years.
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His seminal works have included Process Consultation (1988) and Organizational Culture and Leadership (1992).
Schein elaborated on Lewin’s (1952) model by drawing on other disciplines such as clinical psychology and group dynamics. This model influenced much OD and coaching work throughout the 1990s. (See Chapter 3 for Lewin’s original model.)
SCHEIN’S ELABORATION OF LEWIN’S MODEL Stage One Unfreezing: Creating the motivation to change:
• Disconfirmation. • Creation of survival anxiety or guilt. • Creation of psychological safety to overcome learning anxiety.
Stage Two Learning new concepts and new meanings for old concepts:
• Imitation of and identification with role models. • Scanning for solutions and trial-and-error learning.
Stage Three Refreezing: Internalizing new concepts and meanings:
• Incorporation into self-concept and identity. • Incorporation into ongoing relationships.
Schein sees change as occurring in three stages:
1. unfreezing: creating the motivation to change; 2. learning new concepts and new meanings from old concepts; 3. internalizing new concepts and meanings.
During the initial unfreezing stage people need to unlearn certain things before they can focus fully on new learning.
Schein says that there are two forces at play within every individual undergoing change. The first force is learning anxiety. This is the anxiety associated with learning something new. Will I fail? Will I be exposed? The second, competing force is survival anxiety. This concerns the pressure to change. What if I don’t change? Will I get left behind?
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These anxieties can take many forms. Schein lists four of the associated fears:
1. Fear of temporary incompetence: the conscious appreciation of one’s lack of competence to deal with the new situation.
2. Fear of punishment for incompetence: the apprehension that you will somehow lose out or be punished when this incompetence is discovered or assessed.
3. Fear of loss of personal identity: the inner turmoil when your habitual ways of thinking and feeling are no longer required, or when your sense of self is defined by a role or position that is no longer recognized by the organization.
4. Fear of loss of group membership: in the same way that your identity can be defined by your role, for some it can be profoundly affected by the network of affiliations you have in the workplace. In the same way that the stable equilibrium of a team or group membership can foster states of health, instability caused by shifting team roles or the disintegration of a particular group can have an extremely disturbing effect.
What gets in the way of change: resistance to change
Leaders and managers of change sometimes cannot understand why individuals and groups of individuals do not wholeheartedly embrace changes that are being introduced. They often label this ‘resistance to change’.
Schein suggests that there are two principles for transformative change to work: first, survival anxiety must be greater than learning anxiety, and second, learning anxiety must be reduced rather than increasing survival anxiety. Used in connection with Lewin’s force field (see Chapter 3), we see that survival anxiety is a driving force and learning anxiety is a restraining force. Rather than attempting to increase the individual or group’s sense of survival anxiety, Schein suggests reducing
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the individual’s learning anxiety. Remember also that the restraining forces may well have some validity.
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How do you reduce learning anxiety? You do it by increasing the learner’s sense of psychological safety through a number of interventions. Schein lists a few:
• a compelling vision of the future; • formal training; • involvement of the learner; • informal training of relevant family groups/teams; • practice fields, coaches, feedback; • positive role models; • support groups; • consistent systems and structures; • imitation and identification versus scanning and trial and error.
STOP AND THINK!
Q 1.11 Think of a recent skill that you had to learn in order to keep up with external changes. This could be installing a new piece of software, or learning about how a new organization works.
• What were your survival anxieties? • What were your learning anxieties? • What helped you to change?
How managers and change agents help others to change
We have listed in Table 1.6 some of the interventions that an organization and its management could carry out to facilitate the change process. We have categorized them into the four approaches described earlier in this chapter.
Table 1.6 Representative interventions to facilitate the change process
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From the behavioural perspective a manager must ensure that reward policies and performance management are aligned with the changes taking place. For example if the change is intended to improve the quality of output, then the company should not reward quantity of output. Kerr (1995) lists several traps that organizations fall into:
But reward:
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We hope for:
Teamwork and collaboration The best team members Innovative thinking and risk taking Proven methods and no
mistakes Development of people skills Technical achievements Employee involvement and empowerment Tight control over operations High achievement Another year’s effort
Managers and staff need to know in detail what they are expected to do and how they are expected to perform. Behaviour needs to be defined, especially when many organizations today are promoting ‘the company way’.
From the cognitive perspective a manager needs to employ strategies that link organizational goals, individual goals and motivation. This will create both alignment and motivation. An additional strategy is to provide ongoing coaching through the change process to reframe obstacles and resistances.
The psychodynamic perspective suggests adapting one’s managerial approach and style to the emotional state of the change implementers. This is about treating people as adults and having mature conversations with them. The psychodynamic approach enables managers to see the benefits of looking beneath the surface of what is going on, and uncovering thoughts that are not being articulated and feelings that are not being expressed. Working through these feelings can release energy for the change effort rather than manifesting as resistance to change. Drawing on the transitions curve we can plot suitable interventions throughout the process (see Figure 1.13).
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Figure 1.13 Management interventions through the change process
The humanistic psychology perspective builds on the psychodynamic ethos by believing that people are inherently capable of responding to change, but require enabling structures and strategies so to do. Healthy levels of open communication, and a positive regard for individuals and their potential contribution to the organization’s goals, contribute to creating an environment where individuals can grow and develop.
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
• Learning to do something new usually involves a temporary dip in performance. • When learning something new, we focus on it and become very conscious of our performance.
Once we have learnt something we
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become far less conscious of our performance. We are then unconsciously competent. This continues until something goes wrong, or there is a new challenge.
• There are four key schools of thought when considering individual change: – The behavioural approach is about changing the behaviours of others through reward and punishment. This leads to behavioural analysis and use of reward strategies. – The cognitive approach is about achieving results through positive reframing. Associated techniques are goal setting and coaching to achieve results. – The psychodynamic approach is about understanding and relating to the inner world of change. This is especially significant when people are going through highly affecting change. – The humanistic psychology approach is about believing in development and growth, and maximizing potential. The emphasis is on healthy development, healthy authentic relationships and healthy organizations.
• Personality type has a significant effect on an individual’s ability to initiate or adapt to change. • The individual’s history, the organization’s history, the type of change and the consequence of
the change are also key factors in an individual’s response to change. • Schein identified two competing anxieties in individual change: survival anxiety versus
learning anxiety. Survival anxiety has to be greater than learning anxiety if a change is to happen. He advocated the need for managers to reduce people’s learning anxiety rather than increase their survival anxiety.
• Each of the four approaches above leads to a set of guidelines for managers: – Behavioural: get your reward strategies right. – Cognitive: link goals to motivation. – Psychodynamic: treat people as individuals and understand their emotional states as well as your own! – Humanistic: be authentic and believe that people want to grow and develop.
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2
Team change
INTRODUCTION
This chapter will look at teams, team development and change from a number of perspectives and will be asking a number of pertinent questions:
• What is a group and when is it a team? • Why do you need teams? • What types of organizational teams are there? • How do you improve team effectiveness? • What does team change look like? • What are the leadership issues in team change? • How do individuals affect team dynamics? • How well do teams initiate and adapt to organizational change?
The chapter aims to enhance understanding of the nature of teams and how they develop, identify how teams perform in change situations, and develop strategies for managing teams through change and change through teams.
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We open with a discussion around what constitutes a group and what constitutes a team. We will also look at the phenomena of different types of teams: for example, virtual teams, self-organizing teams and project teams.
Models of team functioning, change and development will be explored. We look at the various components of teamworking, and at how teams develop and how different types of people combine to make a really effective (or not) team.
We take as our basic model Tuckman’s (1965) model of team development to illustrate how teams change over time. This is the forming, storming, norming and performing model. But we will add to it by differentiating between the task aspects of team development and the people aspects of team development.
Finally we look at the way in which teams can impact or react to organizational change.
WHAT IS A GROUP AND WHEN IS IT A TEAM?
There has been much academic discussion as to what constitutes a team and what constitutes a group. In much of the literature the two terms are used indistinguishably. Yet there are crucial differences, and anyone working in an organization instinctively knows when he or she is in a team and when he or she is in a group. We will attempt to clarify the essential similarities and differences. This is important when looking at change because teams and groups experience change in different ways.
Schein and Bennis (1965) suggest that a group is ‘any number of people who interact with each other, are psychologically aware of each other, and who perceive themselves to be a group’. Morgan et al (1986) suggest that ‘a team is a distinguishable set of two or more individuals who interact interdependently and adaptively to achieve specified, shared, and valued objectives’. Sundstrom et al (1990) define the work team as ‘A small group of individuals who share responsibility for outcomes for their organizations.’
Cohen and Bailey (1997) define a team as ‘a collection of individuals who are interdependent in their tasks, who share responsibility for outcomes, who see themselves and who are seen by others as an intact social entity embedded in one or more larger social systems (for example, business unit or the corporation), and who manage their relationships across organizational boundaries’. Our own list of differentiators appears in Table 2.1.
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