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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2.

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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

5.

6.

7.

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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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