Urgent Organization Change and Culture Rigidity

PLEASE ANSWER EACH SEPERATELY
Module 7 DQ 1
What potential obstacles do you face in establishing urgency for change within your organization? How might you circumvent these obstacles?
Module 7 DQ 2
Kotter identifies eight key implementation challenges. Which two do you think would be the most critical to overcome in your organization? Why?
LECTURE NOTES
Introduction
How does culture affect the health and well-being of organizations? Organizational change initiatives often create a tension between the changes required in practices, organizational norms and the well-understood practices shared in the understanding of members within the organization. The well-understood actions and accompanying reward structures of an organization can impede organizational change initiatives.
Culture
Kotter (1996) describes culture in the following way:
Culture refers to norms of behavior and shared values among a group of people. Norms of behavior are common or pervasive ways of acting that are found in a group and that persist because group members tend to behave in ways that teach these practices to new members, rewarding those who fit in and sanctioning those who do not. Shared values are important concerns and goals shared by most of the people in a group that tend to shape group behavior and that often persist over time even when group membership changes (pg.148).
For example, the Los Angeles Police Department has been widely publicized for its leading-edge police academy training during the 1980s. Worldwide attention was given to its contemporary police training methods in sociologically developed crowd management techniques and state of the art equipment. How, then, does one explain the charges of police brutality that exist among its force, when these leading-edge principles of humane policing practices were taught to police cadets.
The answer lies in the deep-seated nature of organizational culture. New recruits are placed with experienced police officers, for training and development activities that teach highly prized characteristics of humane policing practices and policies.
These police officers have experience on the streets in one of the United States' largest cities–a city with random variation in its approaches to life. It is the goal of this police force to maintain order in this environment of random variation. Experienced police officers have the know-how to go about achieving order, while staying alive.
Investigations of training for police officers and day-to-day practice of the police officers' actions has been found to be very different. The reason for the difference is interesting but not surprising. As mentioned, men and women on the police force discovered important principles and practices for staying alive on the job while accomplishing their daily job goals. These practices and principles are widely shared and understood by experienced police, and thus are shared with all new recruits.
A new recruit, fresh from training in one of the world's best police academies, will be exposed to the organization's culture. New recruits are schooled in the practical practices of the police force. These practices are deeply ingrained in the organization's culture. This subculture threatens any new training, new systems, and philosophies introduced into the system, by those who do not know what it takes to get the job done.
Therefore, the most well-meaning change agents arriving on the scene to create better conditions for the organization need to understand "the ways things are" before organizing change interventions that impact a distinct culture.
The Role of Leaders
Leaders will be required to identify norms and practices,which require change, while keeping those norms and practices in place that serve the change initiative. A role for the guiding coalition, as well as all leaders, managers, and supervisors, is to identify the aspects of the culture that may be impediments to change and design the change intervention accordingly. This is an exceptionally important point. No textbook or graduate course can provide a cookbook list of organizational change steps. Yet, however useful general principles and theories may be, managers may face the reality that organizational change efforts might be nuanced. They must reflect the specific issues, urgency, problems, personalities, culture, history, and opportunities of a specific situation. Most importantly, in a great majority of organizational change efforts, things do not go exactly as planned. This suggests that leaders must have early sensing mechanisms to detect when, and in effect know that change is needed for the change program. These sensing mechanisms recognize that false starts, beginning anew, program re-evaluations, or finessing are required for change efforts.
Adjusting Culture
External market force, or discontinuous change, may require minor shifts by the organization or may require significant cultural change. For example, an electronics firm designed disposal cartridges within its product for operator ease. The disposal cartridge would require the customer to dispose of large volumes of non-degradable plastic. When the first order of the product was shipped to a customer in Germany, the customer expressed great appreciation. However, after six months, a box of used cartridges was returned to the company that produced the product. Puzzled, the organization contacted the customer who had sent back the used cartridges and the customer informed the electronics company that, in Europe, a company that designs disposal waste within its product's design must take the disposal items back. Thus, the disposal of this non-degradable material had to become part of the producing company's business expense.
These types of green issues, as well as cultural sensitivity alone, indicate that most firms will have to adjust their culturesto accommodate the shifts required in a global economy.
Kotter (1996) states however, that it is inappropriate to pursue culture change as one of the precipitating events to organizational change. Rather, he suggests that after some short run successes, the organizational improvements achieved are tied back to the change initiatives. In this way, change can be anchored to the culture, and those elements of culture that are inappropriate for the new change initiatives, can be slowly dissolved in favor of more suitable norms and practices.
Leadership must consider the implications of global competition, plus local and environmental issues in the global enterprise system. It must contemplate the implications of these considerations for any business organization.
How can organizational behaviors and norms change to accommodate these deeper principles of environmental sustainability? The role of the guiding coalition is to create the context for change, communicate, and engage the employees in an organization that is concerned for the desired state. Implicit in this activity, the guiding coalition embraces the existing culture, which has a well-worn way of doing things. This well-worn way of accomplishing work, together with its sanctions and rewards, is a quiet target in all change design. Often these ways of working are not articulated, but rather are implicit in the ways things get done. Culture is difficult to change, and only through careful consideration of the elements of culture that support the change initiative and the elements of culture that impede it, will the guiding coalition be able to create the conditions of cultural change necessary to anchor the change project to the organization.
Conclusion
Consideration of the cultural impediments to change is a vital part of the guiding coalition's role. Identification of cultural norms and practices which serve the organization well and those that impede the growth and development of the firm are early activities which will support the success of a change initiative.
References
Kotter, J. P. (1996). Leading change. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.