This posting picks up on what the last one started, a report
on a set of concerns and related questions one can ask about an organization
and its culture when devising a plan to institute meaningful change. That previous posting looked at three
concerns, the first three of six concerns, offered by Lawrence E. Harrison.[1]
His effort is aimed at addressing
national cultures and their function in determining whether lesser developed
countries are successful or not in modernizing their political and economic
efforts. The posting took those ideas
and applied them to the challenge of instituting organizational change. In so doing, the posting identified three
aspects of an organization that are deemed as useful in planning change.
The three aspects are: the typology of existing values and attitudes
among the participants of an organization, understanding of how
cultural values and attitudes affect stated goals, and how the held values and
attitudes relate to the institutions of an organization. If the reader missed that posting, he/she is
encouraged to look it up. For this
posting, its time to move on to the last three concerns.
The fourth concern is how the
organization transmits its values and attitudes. This is a socialization concern. It is important when considering change since
a meaningful change will call on participants to favorably align their values
and attitudes with what the change promotes in terms of behaviors and other
organizational aspects. In the main,
what is important is whether the socialization processes are effective.
Chances are there are deficiencies in
how an organization meets this function.
When that is the case, the change agent needs to ask: what can be done to improve the socializing
processes? These agents, to varying
degrees, must depend on the organization’s established modes of training and
socializing not only new recruits, but its veteran participants as well.
In addition, change agents should
gain an understanding of what organizational assets exist that assist in
transmission efforts. Once identified,
how does one improve them or bolster them?
If there is a general deficiency in this area, how does one change these
elements or “fix” them so they are, in effect, true assets relative to this
concern? Of course, if this is the case,
it augments what needs to be changed making the challenge even more daunting.
The next concern is over how an
organization measures values and attitudes.
This shifts one’s view to a more quantitative issue, although there are
qualitative ways to measure values and attitudes. What is usually done to conduct this introspection,
is for the human relations people to administer a survey instrument asking
people how they feel about different aspects of the organization.
Surely the reader at one time another
has taken one of these. Oftentimes, the
questions ask the respondent to characterize a statement – a description or a
sentiment – in which they indicate how much they agree with it or disagree with
it. The options usually range from
strongly agree – agree – don’t care – disagree – strongly disagree.
The respondent usually indicates
their feeling by choosing a number that corresponds to the various levels (like
1 to 5). This lends itself to
statistical analysis and assumes that if one person indicates a 4, for example,
that roughly equates to someone else indicating a 4.
There are also instruments that ask
for open ended answers. Here there might
be a statistical method to gauge what the respondents are indicating in their
written responses, but more often answers are qualitatively analyzed. Some organizational official reads the
answers and interprets them as to what the respondents feel about what is being
asked.
This writer is not an expert on this
type of concern, but generally feels that for the most part these different
ways of tapping and measuring participant opinions and feelings are legitimate
ways. To the degree they are, they
provide a change agent useful information.
A lot of thought should be used in designing and implementing these
instruments. The object is to get
accurate – as opposed to favorable – sentiments held by those who are the
subjects of a change effort.
The last of the six concerns is
assessing how well ongoing change efforts, within the organization, are doing
in terms of values and attitudes. And
this leads one to ask: how unsettled is
this organization? And one does not need
to be upset with any level of dysfunction.
A word of warning is in order.
When one writes about change, as this
blog has done from time to time, a reader might assume the writer is prone to favor
change. In the case of this blog, that
is not true. This writer favors and sees
value in a stable environment. Change,
given its challenge and its disruptive quality, should only be sought when the need
for it is deeply believed and felt.
That is, it is determined that some
aspect of an organization is seriously undermining the purpose of the
organization – of why it exists. Short
of that, the organization should just be about what it does through the normal
avenues it has established or has been granted.
Take the school system’s effort in
civics education. This blog has promoted
a serious change to that curriculum.
This is not offered off-handedly.
This blog has dedicated a lot space in making the claim that the current
status quo is seriously undermining what this writer believes civics education
should be doing. Here is not the place
to re-state that argument, but to just cite it as an example of when a change
effort is legitimate.
The other aspect of this concern is
whether those change efforts are effective or not. This calls on evaluation and any change
effort needs to have, as part of its processes, an evaluation component. Organizational evaluation is a prominent
issue of concern among organizational scholars.
That component should be
sophisticated enough to include steps like identifying the change’s objectives,
its intermediate accomplishments (often called milestones), the steps that are
designed to accomplish those intermediate accomplishments, and all this needs
to identify qualitative levels of success or failure. This in turn points to both terminal
evaluation (did the process succeed or not?) and formative evaluation (is the
effort getting there?).
And with that, Harrison’s suggested
concerns over culture, be it national or organizational, is done. Future postings will look at other elements
of culture and how it indeed matters.
[1] Lawrence E. Harrison, “Introduction: Why Culture Matters,” in Culture Matters: How Values
Shape Human Progress, ed. Lawrence E. Harrison (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000), xvii-xxxiv.
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