topic:military organization & course:MAN425-advanced organizational management
17 A CONCEPTUAL MODEL FOR MANAGED CULTURE CHANGE
In Chapter Sixteen, I reviewed all the ways in which culture can and does change,
noting how leaders can influence these processes. However, many of the mechanisms
described are either too slow or cannot be conveniently implemented. Subcultural
diversity may not be sufficient, outsiders with the right new assumptions may not be
available, and creating scandals or introducing new technology may not be practical. How
then does a leader systematically set out to change how an organization operates,
recognizing that such change may involve varying degrees of culture change?
In this chapter, I will describe a model of planned, managed change and discuss the
various principles that have to be taken into account if the changes involve culture. It is
my experience that culture change is rarely the primary change goal even though it is
announced as such. Instead, change occurs when leaders perceive some problems that
need fixing or identify some new goals that need to be achieved. Whether these changes
will involve culture change remains to be seen. In the context of such organizational
changes, culture change may become involved, but the leader must first understand the
general processes of organizational change before managed culture change as such
becomes relevant.
The Psycho-Social Dynamics of Organizational Change
The fundamental assumptions underlying any change in a human system are derived
originally from Kurt Lewin (1947). I have elaborated and refined his basic model in my
studies of coercive persuasion, professional education, group dynamics training, and
management development (Schein, 1961a, 1961b, 1964, 1972; Schein and Bennis,
1965). This elaborated model is shown in Exhibit 17.1
Exhibit 17.1. The Stages of Learning/Change.
Stage 1 Unfreezing: Creating the Motivation to Change
Disconfirmation
Creation of survival anxiety or guilt
Creation of psychological safety to overcome learning anxiety
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Stage 2 Learning New Concepts, New Meanings for Old Concepts, and New Standards for Judgment
Imitation of and identification with role models
Scanning for solutions and trial-and-error learning
Stage 3 Internalizing New Concepts, Meanings, and Standards
Incorporation into self-concept and identity
Incorporation into ongoing relationships
All human systems attempt to maintain equilibrium and to maximize their autonomy vis-
à-vis their environment. Coping, growth, and survival all involve maintaining the integrity
of the system in the face of a changing environment that is constantly causing varying
degrees of disequilibrium. The function of cognitive structures such as concepts, beliefs,
attitudes, values, and assumptions is to organize the mass of environmental stimuli, to
make sense of them, and to provide, thereby, a sense of predictability and meaning to the
individual members (Weick, 1995; Weick and Sutcliffe, 2001). The set of shared
assumptions that develop over time in groups and organizations serves this stabilizing
and meaning-providing function. The evolution of culture is therefore one of the ways in
which a group or organization preserves its integrity and autonomy, differentiates itself
from the environment and other groups, and provides itself an identity.
Unfreezing/Disconfirmation
If any part of the core cognitive structure is to change in more than minor incremental
ways, the system must first experience enough disequilibrium to force a coping process
that goes beyond just reinforcing the assumptions that are already in place. Lewin called
the creation of such disequilibrium unfreezing, or creating a motivation to change.
Unfreezing, as I have subsequently analyzed it, is composed of three very different
processes, each of which must be present to a certain degree for the system to develop any
motivation to change: (1) enough disconfirming data to cause serious discomfort and
disequilibrium; (2) the connection of the disconfirming data to important goals and
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ideals, causing anxiety and/or guilt; and (3) enough psychological safety, in the sense of
being able to see a possibility of solving the problem and learning something new without
loss of identity or integrity (Schein, 1980, 2009b).
Transformative change implies that the person or group that is the target of change must
unlearn something as well as learning something new. Most of the difficulties of such
change have to do with the unlearning because what we have learned has become
embedded in various routines and may have become part of our personal and group
identity. The key to understanding “resistance to change” is to recognize that some
behavior that has become dysfunctional for us may, nevertheless, be difficult to give up
and replace because it serves other positive functions. Psychotherapists call
this “secondary gain” as an explanation of why we sometimes continue to live with our
neurotic behavior.
Disconfirmation is any information that shows the organization that some of its goals are
not being met or that some of its processes are not accomplishing what they are supposed
to: sales are off, customer complaints are up, products with quality problems are returned
more frequently, managers and employees are quitting in greater numbers than usual,
employees are sick or absent more and more, and so on. Disconfirming information can
be economic, political, social, or personal—as when a charismatic leader chides a group
for not living up to its own ideals and thereby induces guilt. Scandals or embarrassing
leaks of information are often the most powerful kind of disconfirmation. However, the
information is usually only symptomatic. It does not automatically tell the organization
what the underlying problem might be, but it creates disequilibrium in pointing out that
something is wrong somewhere. It makes members of the organization uncomfortable
and anxious—a state that we can think of as survival anxiety in that it implies that unless
we change, something bad will happen to the individual, the group, and/or the
organization.
Survival anxiety does not, by itself, automatically produce a motivation to change because
members of the organization can deny the validity of the information or rationalize that it
is irrelevant. For example, if employee turnover suddenly increases, leaders or
organization members can say, “It is only the bad people who are leaving, the ones we
don't want anyway.” Or if sales are down, it is possible to say, “This is only a reflection of
a minor recession.”
What makes this level of denial and repression likely is the fact that the prospect of
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learning new ways of perceiving, thinking, feeling, and behaving also creates anxiety—
what we can think of as learning anxiety, a feeling that “I cannot learn new behaviors or
adopt new attitudes without losing a feeling of self-esteem or group membership.” The
reduction of this learning anxiety is the third and most important component of
unfreezing—the creation of psychological safety. The learner must come to feel that the
new way of being is possible and achievable, and that the learning process itself will not
be too anxiety provoking or demeaning.
For example, in the case of Amoco, the new reward and control system required
engineers to change their self-image from being members of an organization to being self-
employed consultants who now had to sell their services. The Amoco engineers simply
could not imagine how they could function as freelance consultants; they had no skills
along those lines. In the case of the Alpha Power Company, the electrical workers had to
change their self-image from being employees who heroically kept power and heat on to
being responsible stewards of the environment, preventing and cleaning up spills
produced by their trucks or transformers. The new rules required them to report
incidents that might be embarrassing to their group, and even to report on each other if
they observed environmentally irresponsible behavior in fellow workers. But they were in
a panic because they did not know how to diagnose environmentally dangerous
conditions—how to determine, for example, whether a spill required a simple mop-up or
was full of dangerous chemicals such as PCBs, or whether a basement was merely dusty
or was filled with asbestos dust.
Sometimes disconfirming data have existed for a long time but because of a lack of
psychological safety, the organization has avoided anxiety or guilt by denying the data's
relevance, validity, or even its existence. It is our capacity both as individuals and as
organizations to deny or even repress disconfirming data that makes whistle blowing or
scandals such powerful change motivators. The failure to pay attention to disconfirming
data occurs at two levels—leaders who are in a position to act deny or repress the data for
personal psychological reasons, and/or the information is available in various parts of the
organization but is suppressed in various ways. In the analysis of accidents, it is routinely
found that some employees had observed various hazards and did not report them, were
not listened to, or were actually encouraged to suppress their observations (Gerstein,
2008; Perin, 2005). The organizational dynamic is to deny information because to
accept it would compromise the ability to achieve other values or goals, or would damage
the self-esteem or face of the organization itself.
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Survival Anxiety Versus Learning Anxiety
If the disconfirming data “get through” the learners’ denial and defensiveness, they will
recognize the need to change, the need to give up some old habits and ways of thinking,
and the need to learn some new habits and ways of thinking. However, this produces
learning anxiety. The interaction of these two anxieties creates the complex dynamics of
change.
The easiest way to illustrate this dynamic is in terms of learning a new stroke in tennis or
golf. The process starts with disconfirmation—you are not beating some of the people you
are used to beating, or your aspirations for a better score or a better-looking game are not
met, so you feel the need to improve your game. But, as you contemplate the actual
process of unlearning your old stroke and developing a new stroke, you realize that you
may not be able to do it, or you may be temporarily incompetent during the learning
process. These feelings are “learning anxiety.” Similar feelings arise in the cultural area
when the new learning involves becoming computer competent; changing your
supervisory style; transforming competitive relationships into teamwork and
collaboration; changing from a high-quality, high-cost strategy into becoming the low-
cost producer; moving from engineering domination and product orientation to a
marketing and customer orientation; learning to work in nonhierarchical diffuse
networks; and so on.
It is important to understand that learning anxiety can be based on one or more valid
reasons:
Fear of loss of power or position: The fear that with new learning, we will have
less power or status than we had before.
Fear of temporary incompetence: During the learning process, we will be
unable to feel competent because we have given up the old way and have not yet
mastered the new way. The best examples come from the efforts to learn to use
computers.
Fear of punishment for incompetence: If it takes a long time to learn the new
way of thinking and doing things, we fear that we will be punished for lack of
productivity. In the computer arena, there are some striking cases in which
employees never learned the new system sufficiently to take advantage of its
potential because they felt they had to remain productive and thus spent insufficient
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time on the new learning.
Fear of loss of personal identity: We may not want to be the kind of people that
the new way of working would require us to be. For example, in the early days of the
break-up of the Bell System, many old-time employees left because they could not
accept the identity of being a member of a hard-driving, cost-conscious organization
that “would take phones away from consumers who could not afford them.” Some
electrical workers in Alpha Power resigned or retired because they could not stand
the self-image of being environmental stewards.
Fear of loss of group membership: The shared assumptions that make up a
culture also identify who is in and who is out of the group. If by developing new ways
of thinking or new behavior, we will become a deviant in our group, we may be
rejected or even ostracized. This fear is perhaps the most difficult to overcome
because it requires the whole group to change its ways of thinking and its norms of
inclusion and exclusion.
One or more of these forces lead to what we end up calling resistance to change. It is
usually glibly attributed to “human nature,” but as I have tried to indicate, it is actually a
rational response to many situations that require people to change. As long as learning
anxiety remains high, an individual will be motivated to resist the validity of the
disconfirming data or will invent various excuses why he or she cannot really engage in a
transformative learning process right now. These responses come in the following stages
(Coghlan, 1996):
Denial: Convincing ourselves that the disconfirming data are not valid, are
temporary, don't really count, reflect someone just crying “wolf,” and so on.
Scapegoating, passing the buck, dodging: Convincing ourselves that the cause
is in some other department, that the data do not apply to us, and that others need to
change first.
Maneuvering, bargaining: Wanting special compensation for the effort to make
the change; wanting to be convinced that it is in our own interest, and will be of long-
range benefit.
Given all of these bases of resistance to change, how then does the change leader create
the conditions for transformative change? Two principles come into play:
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Principle 1: Survival anxiety or guilt must be greater than learning anxiety.
Principle 2: Learning anxiety must be reduced rather than increasing survival
anxiety.
From the change leader's point of view, it might seem obvious that the way to motivate
learning is simply to increase the survival anxiety or guilt. The problem with that
approach is that greater threat or guilt may simply increase defensiveness to avoid the
threat or pain of the learning process. And that logic leads to the key insight about
transformative change embodied in Principle 2: The change leader must reduce learning
anxiety by increasing the learner's sense of psychological safety—the third component of
unfreezing.
How to Create Psychological Safety
Creating psychological safety for organizational members who are undergoing
transformational learning involves eight activities that must be carried on almost
simultaneously. They are listed chronologically, but the change leader must be prepared
to implement all of them.
A compelling positive vision: The targets of change must believe that the
organization will be better off if they learn the new way of thinking and working.
Such a vision must be articulated and widely held by senior management and must
spell out in clear behavioral terms what “the new way of working” will be. It must
also be recognized that this new way of working is nonnegotiable.
Formal training: If the new way of working requires new knowledge and skill,
members must be provided with the necessary formal and informal training. For
example, if the new way of working requires teamwork, then formal training on team
building and maintenance must be provided. As we will see, this will be especially
relevant in multicultural groups.
Involvement of the learner: If the formal training is to take hold, the learners
must have a sense that they can manage their own informal learning process. Each
learner will learn in a slightly different way, so it is essential to involve learners in
designing their own optimal learning process. The goals of learning are
nonnegotiable, but the method of learning can be highly individualized.
Informal training of relevant “family” groups, and teams: Because cultural
assumptions are embedded in groups, informal training and practice must be
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provided to whole groups so that new norms and new assumptions can be jointly
built. Learners should not feel like deviants if they decide to engage in the new
learning.
Practice fields, coaches, and feedback: Learners cannot learn something
fundamentally new if they don't have the time, the resources, the coaching, and valid
feedback on how they are doing. Practice fields are particularly important so that
learners can make mistakes without disrupting the organization.
Positive role models: The new way of thinking and behaving may be so different
from what learners are used to that they may need to be able to see what it looks like
before they can imagine themselves doing it. They must be able to see the new
behavior and attitudes in others with whom they can identify.
Support groups in which learning problems can be aired and discussed:
Learners need to be able to talk about their frustrations and difficulties in learning
with others who are experiencing similar difficulties so that they can support each
other and jointly learn new ways of dealing with the difficulties.
Systems and structures that are consistent with the new way of thinking
and working: For example, if the goal of the change program is to learn how to be
more of a team player, the reward system must be group oriented, the discipline
system must punish individually aggressive selfish behavior, and the organizational
structures must make it possible to work as a team.
Most transformational change programs fail because they do not create the eight
conditions outlined here. And when we consider the difficulty of achieving all eight
conditions and the energy and resources that have to be expended to achieve them, it is
small wonder that changes are often short-lived or never get going at all. On the other
hand, when an organization sets out to really transform itself by creating psychological
safety, real and significant changes can be achieved.
When and how does culture become involved? The disconfirming data are only
symptoms, which should trigger some diagnostic work, focusing on the underlying
problem or issue that needs to be addressed. Before we even start to think about culture,
we need to (1) have a clear definition of the operational problem or issue that started the
change process, and to (2) formulate specific new behavioral goals. It is in this analysis
that we may first encounter the need for some culture assessment to determine to what
degree cultural elements are involved in the problem situation. At this point, an
assessment of the kind I will describe in the next chapter first becomes relevant. It should
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not be undertaken, however, until some effort has been made to identify what changes
are going to be made, what the “new way of working” will be to fix the problem, and how
difficult and anxiety-provoking the learning of the “new way” will be (Coutu, 2002;
Schein, 2009b).
After the desired changes have been made behaviorally specific, it is now relevant to
ask: “How will the existing culture help us or hinder us?” Some form of cultural
assessment now becomes relevant and will be described in detail in the next chapter. The
remainder of this chapter must now examine how change actually takes place.
Cognitive Restructuring
After an organization has been unfrozen, the change process proceeds along a number of
different lines that reflect either new learning, through trial and error based on scanning
the environment broadly, or imitation of role models, based on psychological
identification with the role model. The Amoco change initiative to redefine the roles of
the engineers falls into the scanning model in that engineers had to figure out for
themselves how to make the transition to the consulting role. Alpha's program of
environmental responsibility was primarily a case of teaching employees how to follow
procedures based on extensive training, which is based more on identification with role
models. In either case, the essence of the new learning is some “cognitive redefinition” of
some of the core concepts in the assumption set. For example, when companies which
assume that they are lifetime employers who never lay anyone off are faced with the
economic necessity to reduce payroll costs, they cognitively redefine layoffs
as “transitions” or “early retirements,” make the transition packages very generous,
provide long periods of time during which the employees can seek alternative
employment, offer extensive counseling, provide outplacement services, and so on, all to
preserve the assumption that “we treat our people fairly and well.” This process is more
than rationalization. It is a genuine cognitive redefinition on the part of the senior
management of the organization and is viewed ultimately as “restructuring.”
Most change processes emphasize the need for behavior change. Such change is
important in laying the groundwork for cognitive redefinition, but behavior change alone
will not last unless it is accompanied by cognitive redefinition. For example, the Alpha
environmental program began with the enforcement of rules but eventually became
internalized as employees cognitively redefined their job/role and their identity. Some
engineers at Amoco were able to redefine their self-image quickly and become
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comfortable with the new job structure.
Behavior change can be coerced at the beginning of a change program, but it will not last
after the coercive force is lifted unless cognitive redefinition has preceded or
accompanied it. Some change theories (for example, Festinger, 1957) argue that if
behavior change is coerced for a long enough period of time, cognitive structures will
adapt to rationalize the behavior change that is occurring. The evidence for this is not
clear, however, as recent developments in former Communist countries reveal. People
living under communism did not automatically become Communists even though they
were coerced for fifty years or more.
Learning New Concepts and New Meanings for Old Concepts
If someone has been trained to think in a certain way and has been a member of a group
that has also thought that way, how can that person imagine changing to a new way of
thinking? As pointed out earlier, if you were an engineer in Amoco, you would have been
a member of a division working as an expert technical resource with a clear career line
and a single boss. In the new structure of a centralized engineering group “selling its
services for set fees,” you were now asked to think of yourself as a member of a consulting
organization selling its services to customers who could purchase those services
elsewhere if they did not like your deal. For you to make such a transformation would
required you to develop several new concepts—“freelance consultant,” “selling services
for a fee,” and “competing with outsiders who could underbid you.” In addition, you
would have to learn a new meaning for the concept of what it meant to be an “engineer”
and what it meant to be an “employee of Amoco.” You would have to learn a new reward
system—that you would now be paid and promoted based on your ability to bring in
work. You would have to learn to see yourself as much as a salesman as an engineer. You
would have to define your career in different terms and learn to work for lots of different
bosses.
Along with new concepts would come new standards of evaluation. Whereas in the
former structure you were evaluated largely on the quality of your work, now you had to
estimate more accurately just how many days a given job would take, what quality level
could be achieved in that time, and what it would cost if you tried for the higher-quality
standard you were used to. This might require a whole new set of skills of how to make
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estimates and create accurate budgets.
If standards do not shift, problems do not get solved. The computer designers at DEC
who tried to develop products competitive with the IBM PC never changed their
standards for evaluating what a customer expected. They over-designed the products,
building in far too many bells and whistles, which made them too expensive.
Imitation and Identification Versus Scanning and Trial-and- Error Learning
As I stated at the outset of this section, there are basically two mechanisms by which we
learn new concepts, new meanings for old concepts, and new standards of evaluation—
either we learn through imitating a role model and psychologically identifying with that
person, or we keep inventing our own solutions until something works. The leader as
change manager has a choice as to which mechanism to encourage. Imitation and
identification work best when (1) it is clear what the new way of working is to be, and
when (2) the concepts to be taught are themselves clear. For example, the leader
can “walk the talk” in the sense of making himself or herself a role model of the new
behavior that is expected. As part of a training program, the leader can provide role
models through case materials, films, role-plays, or simulations. Learners who have
acquired the new concepts can be brought in to encourage others to get to know how they
did it. This mechanism is also the most efficient, but has the risk that what the learner
learns does not integrate well into his or her personality or is not acceptable to the groups
he or she belongs to. This means that the new learning may not be internalized, and the
learner will revert to prior behavior after the coercive pressure to perform is no longer
there.
If the change leader wants us to learn things that really fit into our personality, then we
must learn to scan our environment and develop our own solutions. For example, Amoco
could have developed a training program for how to be a consultant, built around
engineers who had made the shift successfully. However, senior management felt that
such a shift was so personal that they decided merely to create the structure and the
incentives but to let individual engineers figure out for themselves how they wanted to
manage the new kinds of relationships. In some cases, this meant people leaving the
organization. But those engineers who learned from their own experience how to be
consultants genuinely evolved to a new kind of career that they integrated into their total
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lives.
The general principle here is that the leader as change manager must be clear about the
ultimate goals—the new way of working that is to be achieved—but that does not
necessarily imply that everyone will get to that goal in the same way. Involvement of the
learner does not imply that the learner has a choice about the ultimate goals, but it does
imply that he or she has a choice of the means to get there.
Refreezing
The final step in any given change process is refreezing, by which Lewin meant that the
new learning will not stabilize until it is reinforced by actual results. The Alpha employees
discovered that not only could they deal with environmental hazards but that it was
satisfying and worthwhile to do so, hence they internalized the attitude that a clean and
safe environment was in everyone's interest even if it meant slowing jobs down when a
hazard was encountered. If the change leaders have correctly diagnosed what behavior is
needed to fix the problems that launched the change program, then the new behavior will
produce better results and be confirmed.
If it turns out that the new behavior does not produce better results, this information will
be perceived as disconfirming information and will launch a new change process. Human
systems are, therefore, potentially in perpetual flux, and the more dynamic the
environment becomes, the more that may require an almost perpetual change and
learning process.
Principles in Regard to Culture Change
When an organization encounters disconfirming information and launches a change
program, it is not clear at the outset whether culture change will be involved and how the
culture will aid or hinder the change program. To clarify these issues, a culture
assessment process of the kind described in the next chapter becomes appropriate.
However, it is generally better to be very clear about the change goals before launching
the culture assessment.
Principle 3: The change goal must be defined concretely in terms of the specific
problem you are trying to fix, not as “culture change.”
For example, in the Alpha Power Company case, the court said that the company had
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to become more environmentally responsible and more open in its reporting. The
change goal was to get employees (1) to become more aware of environmental
hazards, (2) to report them immediately to the appropriate agencies, (3) to learn how
to clean up the hazardous conditions, and (4) to learn how to prevent spills and other
hazards from occurring in the first place. Whether or not the “culture” needed to be
changed was not known when the change program was launched. Only as specific
goals were identified could the change leaders determine whether or not cultural
elements would aid or hinder the change. In fact, it turned out that large portions of
the culture could be used positively to change some specific elements in the culture
that did have to be changed. The fact that the entire workforce could be trained
immediately in how to identify hazards and what to do about them was a reflection of
the highly structured, technical, autocratic Alpha culture. The bulk of the existing
culture was used to change some peripheral cultural elements.
One of the biggest mistakes that leaders make when they undertake change
initiatives is to be vague about their change goals and to assume that “culture
change” would be needed. When someone asks me to help him or her with a “culture
change program,” my most important initial question is “What do you mean? Can
you explain your goals without using the word ‘culture’?”
Principle 4: Old cultural elements can be destroyed by eliminating the people
who “carry” those elements, but new cultural elements can only be learned if the new
behavior leads to success and satisfaction.
Once a culture exists, once an organization has had some period of success and
stability, the culture cannot be changed directly unless the group itself is dismantled.
A leader can impose new ways of doing things, can articulate new goals and means,
and can change reward and control systems, but none of those changes will produce
culture change unless the new way of doing things actually works better and provides
the members a new set of shared experiences that eventually lead to culture change.
Principle 5: Culture change is always transformative change that requires a period
of unlearning that is psychologically painful.
Many kinds of changes that leaders impose on their organizations require only new
learning and therefore will not be resisted. These are usually new behaviors that make it
easier to do what we want to do anyway, such as learning a new software program to
make our work on the computer more efficient. However, once we are adults and once
our organizations have developed routines and processes that we have become used to,
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we may find that new proposed ways of doing things look like they will be hard to learn or
will make us feel inadequate in various ways. We may feel comfortable with our present
software and may feel that to learn a new system is not worth the effort. The change
leader therefore needs a model of change that includes “unlearning” as a legitimate stage
and that can deal with transformations, not just enhancements.
Summary and Conclusions
Culture change inevitably involves unlearning as well as relearning and is, therefore, by
definition, transformative. This chapter describes a general change model that
acknowledges from the outset the difficulty of launching any transformative change
because of the anxiety associated with new learning. The change process starts with
disconfirmation, which produces survival anxiety or guilt—the feeling that we must
change—but the learning anxiety associated with having to change our competencies, our
role or power position, our identity elements, and possibly our group membership causes
denial and resistance to change. The only way to overcome such resistance is to reduce
the learning anxiety by making the learner feel “psychologically safe.” The conditions for
creating psychological safety were described. If new learning occurs, it usually
reflects “cognitive redefinition,” which consists of learning new concepts, learning new
meanings for old concepts, and adopting new standards of evaluation. Such new learning
occurs either through identification with role models or through trial-and-error learning
based on scanning the environment.
The change goals should initially be focused on the concrete problems to be fixed; and
only when those goals are clear is it appropriate to do a culture assessment to determine
how the culture will aid or hinder the change process. How such a culture assessment
would be done is the topic of the next chapter.
Page 14 of 1417 A CONCEPTUAL MODEL FOR MANAGED CULTURE CHANGE
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