Let me finish with my sentiments on change and transformative
leadership. Over many postings, I have
been describing and explaining what I consider are the factors affecting
organizational change. Early on, I contextualized
these postings as a concern for school efforts to potentially institute changes
in their civics curriculum content. For
those of you who regularly read this blog, you know that one of my overarching
goals is to promote a curricular view of what civics content should be. Over the years, I have made the case that the present
civics curriculum choices have been guided by the natural rights
construct. I have also suggested that
that construct should not hold such a central role, but that curriculum workers
and teachers should adopt another construct, federation theory. To make such a change, those who teach civics
and government should view their subject matter from a different
perspective. Since we are talking about
a social concern, how we view government and politics – how we view the content
– can and often does reflect how we see and feel about how we get along with
others. I am always taken aback by how
little most people appreciate how political our lives are. Politics transcends government and is an
element of just about every segment of our social lives. There is politics in families, at church, at the
workplace, at the supermarket; you name the social setting and chances are that
politics is involved. In all of these places,
questions of who gets what, where, and how are bound to emerge. Basically, the question I have been dealing
with in these postings dedicated to change theory and leadership is whether
those decisions are to be made by someone in charge using such managerial
assets as rewards and/or punishments or be a general process by which those
involved share in the responsibility to identify, plan, and implement the
solution for political problems. In
general, I would claim that if the problem is limited in terms of the number of
people affected or the issues are more superficial than those central to the
organization, perhaps a “person in charge” can lead a staff to institute needed
change. But if the number of people is
significant and/or the issue(s) is (are) either foundational or central to the
organization’s mission, then a more “we the people” approach seems to be
necessary to achieve satisfactory results.
Why? Because, as with
the case of changing curricular content and the way people see that content,
this type of change is not a simple “do this instead of that” solution, but it
is “see it this way instead of that way” and “feel about it this way instead of
that way” type of change. For this sort
of organizational change – transformative change – rewards and punishments will
not lead to a change of mind or heart on the part of those who need to change their
behavior. What is called for is a normative
change and that is achieved only by effective re-education. Therefore, a normative-re-educative strategy
needs to be implemented. This has been
identified by change experts as a type of change strategy that agents are
trained in to be able to advise organizations in their efforts to institute
such change.
Change studies seem to indicate that the distinction between
subordinates (changed-for) and leaders can be a contributing factor in whether
the leader will have an impact on how change efforts are seen by the
changed-for. If the leader is seen as a
reflection of themselves – the leader is just one of us – then the leader is
likely to have less of an impact. Further,
if the staff is manned by self-motivated and self-confident individuals, then messages
from the leader will have limited effect on the perceptions and behaviors of
subordinates.[1] This is a bit ironic. The goal of normative-re-educative strategies
is to get the planned-for to exhibit self-motivated initiatives, but to do so
within the overall efforts of the group.
It can be, that if a staff is populated with such self-assured people, it
is likely that an active and dynamic oriented culture prevails in such
organizations and the potential of such transformative change is not such a big
deal, but instead is the continuous modus operandi. Two comments here: how exciting it is that such a possibility
exists and I have never been a member of such a school staff nor have I run
across it.
And with that, I conclude for now my comments concerning
change. As I mentioned in an earlier
posting, this whole area of change is fascinating and worth our study. This is so not only in terms of curricular
change, but also in terms of political study in general.
[1] Wyle, D. C. (2013).
Transformation leadership: When
is it redundant? Academy of Management Perspectives, 2013, Vol. 27, No. 2, see http://dx.doi.org/10.5465/amp.2013.0064
.
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