Organisational learning and change

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Waddell6e_PP_Ch08_Chapter8-ODinterventions-strategyandstructure.ppt
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CHAPTER 8

OD interventions:
Strategy and structure

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LEARNING OUTCOMES

  • After studying this chapter, you should be able to:
  • Explain the different ways an organisation can respond to its environment.
  • Describe the guidelines for open systems planning.
  • Discuss planned change initiatives, including transorganisational development, restructuring and re-engineering.
  • Explain the three approaches to work design.

ORGANISATION AND ENVIRONMENTAL FRAMEWORK

General, task and enacted environments

Organisation responses to environmental drivers

Critical Question: What do you understand ‘environment’ to mean?

ENVIRONMENT

Consists of everything outside organisations that can affect, either directly or indirectly, their performance and outcome

General environment

  • Social, economic and ecological forces

Task environment

  • Customers, suppliers, competitors, producers of substitute products/services, unions and potential new entrants

Enacted environment

  • Managerial perceptions and representations of the environment

Critical Question: Give an example of each of these three environments.

ENVIRONMENTAL DIMENSIONS AND ORGANISATIONAL TRANSACTIONS

Critical Question: Give an example for each of these quadrants.

ORGANISATIONAL RESPONSES:
SCANNING UNITS

  • Special units for scanning particular parts or aspects of the environment
  • market research
  • public relations
  • government relations
  • strategic planning
  • Gather and interpret relevant information about the environment, communicating it to decision makers
  • Enables organisations to monitor and make sense of their environment and gives a competitive edge

Critical Question: What are the limitations of scanning?

ORGANISATIONAL RESPONSES:
PROACTIVE

  • Engage in political activity to influence laws and regulations
  • Seek government regulation to control entry to industries
  • Behave in a socially responsible way
  • Acquire control over resources
  • Introduce new products/services and use advertising to shape customer preferences

ORGANISATION RESPONSES:
COLLECTIVE STRUCTURES

  • Organisations deal with problems of environmental dependence and uncertainty by building alliances with other organisations, e.g. bargaining, contracting, co-opting, joint ventures, strategic alliances, consortia and federations

OPEN SYSTEMS PLANNING

Underlying assumptions of Open Systems Planning (OSP)

Implementation process

Guidelines for implementation.

Critical Question: What does ‘Open System’ mean?

UNDERLYING ASSUMPTIONS IN OSP

  • Perceptions play a major role in environmental relations
  • Organisation members must share a common view of the environment
  • Perceptions must accurately reflect the condition of the environment if organisational responses are to be effective
  • Organisations can not only adapt to their environment, but also create it proactively

OSP IMPLEMENTATION PROCESS

Assess the external environment

Assess how the organisation responds to the external environment

Identify the core mission of the organisation

Create a realistic future scenario of environmental expectations and organisational responses

Create an ideal future scenario of environmental expectations and organisation responses

Compare the present with the ideal future and prepare an action plan for reducing the discrepancy

Critical Question: What could go wrong with this process?

GUIDELINES FOR IMPLEMENTING OSP

  • Devote sufficient time and resources
  • Document all steps
  • Deal only with key parts of the environment
  • Follow the steps in order
  • View planning as a process, not an outcome

TRANSORGANISATIONAL DEVELOPMENT (TD)

  • Defining transorganisational development (TD)
  • Transorganisational systems and their problems
  • TD application stages

Critical Question: Before progressing to the next overhead, what do you understand TD to mean?

TRANSORGANISATIONAL
DEVELOPMENT (CONT.)

  • An emerging form of planned change aimed at helping organisations develop collective and collaborative strategies with other organisations
  • When one organisation forms a partnership with another to perform tasks and solve problems that are too complex to be handled alone

Critical Question: Can you offer examples of TD?

TRANSORGANISATIONAL SYSTEMS (TSS) AND THEIR PROBLEMS

  • TSs are complex, with individual organisations coming together for a common purpose
  • Tend to be underorganised and:
  • Relationships among member organisations are loosely coupled;
  • Leadership and power are dispersed among autonomous organisations rather than hierarchically centralised; and
  • Commitment and membership are tenuous as member organisations attempt to maintain their autonomy while coming together for the common purpose
  • Regarded as difficult to manage, but a useful response to external threat

TD APPLICATION STAGES

Critical Activity: Give an example to show how these stages apply.

RESTRUCTURING ORGANISATIONS

  • Downsizing
  • Re-engineering

Critical Questions: What has happened since downsizing and re-engineering are being used frequently?

Were they considered successful or otherwise?

DOWNSIZING

  • Refers to interventions that are aimed at reducing the size of the organisation
  • Application stages
  • Clarify the organisation’s strategy
  • Assess downsizing options and make relevant choices
  • Implement the changes
  • Address the needs of survivors and those who leave
  • Follow through with growth plans
  • Results
  • Research shows mixed results
  • The way in which downsizing is conducted may explain these divergent outcomes
  • Following a well planned application of the process seems to improve outcomes

DOWNSIZING TACTICS

Critical Activity: Add another column to the Table and include

the problems which may occur with each tactic.

RE-ENGINEERING

The fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes in order to achieve dramatic improvements in performance.

Implementation steps

  • Prepare the organisation
  • Fundamentally rethink the way work gets done
  • Identify and analyse core business processes
  • Define performance objectives
  • Design new processes
  • Restructure the organisation around the new business processes

Results

  • Wide variation
  • Little systematic research despite popularity

Critical Question: Will re-engineering survive the evolution of management theory?

WORK DESIGN

Three approaches to work design

Redesigning work for technical and personal needs

THREE APPROACHES TO WORK DESIGN

  • Engineering approach
  • Focuses on efficiency and simplification and results in traditional jobs and work groups redesigns
  • Motivational approach
  • Uses motivational theories
  • Focuses on enriching the work experience
  • Sociotechnical Systems (STS) approach
  • Seeks to optimise both the social and technical aspects of work systems

UNDERSTANDING THE CORE DIMENSIONS OF A JOB

Critical Activity: Explain your understanding

of this Figure by using examples.

JOB ENRICHMENT:
BARRIERS AND RESULTS

  • Not all people react in similar ways to job enrichment interventions
  • Individual differences can impact negatively
  • A worker’s knowledge and skill levels
  • Growth-need
  • Strength and satisfaction with contextual factors

JOB ENRICHMENT:
BARRIERS AND RESULTS (CONT.)

  • Four system level barriers have also been identified
  • Technical system
  • Personnel system
  • Control system
  • Supervisory system
  • Results from participants are generally positive

STS CONCEPTUAL BACKGROUND

  • Two fundamental notions
  • An organisation/work unit is a combined, social-plus-technical system
  • This system is open to its environment
  • Self managed work teams are the most common application of STS

Critical Question: What do you understand as sociotechnical systems (STS) approach?

SELF-MANAGED WORK TEAMS

Critical Question: Is there anything missing from

this Figure? Can you improve it?

STS: APPLICATION STAGES

  • Sanction the design effort
  • Diagnose the work system
  • Generate appropriate designs
  • Specify support systems
  • Implement and evaluate the work designs
  • Continually change and improve

Critical Question: What difficulties may occur

with each of these stages?

DESIGNING WORK: TECHNICAL FACTORS

  • Technical interdependence
  • Extent to which cooperation among workers is required to produce a product or service
  • Technical uncertainty
  • Amount of information processing and decision making that employees must do to complete a task

Critical Question: What is the fundamental assumption about technological change which may undermine designing work?

WORK DESIGNS THAT OPTIMISE TECHNOLOGY

DESIGNING WORK: PERSONAL FACTORS

  • Social Needs
  • Desire for significant social relationships
  • Growth Needs
  • Desire for personal accomplishment, learning and development

WORK DESIGNS THAT OPTIMISE PERSONAL NEEDS

‘Thus we may know that there are 5 essentials for victory:

He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight;

He will win who knows how to handle both superior and inferior forces;

He will win who knows whose enemy is animated by the spirit throughout all its ranks;

He will win who, prepared himself, waits to take the enemy unprepared;

He will win who has military capacity and is not interfered with by the sovereign.’

Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Critical Activity: Apply these essentials to OD strategy and structure.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

SUMMARY

  • Newer forms of OD and organisation change focus on external environmental factors and systems level changes to optimise organisation performance.
  • The impact of the external environment is becoming increasingly important.
  • Responses to external threats and pressures:
  • Open systems planning
  • Transorganisational interventions
  • Organisation restructuring
  • Changes in work design.
  • Juggling the personal needs of people with the technical needs of work is becoming increasingly complex.

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