Chapter 15

Question 1

What are the 3 basic stages of the change process?

Answer 1

Unfreezing- Recognition that some current state of affairs is unsatisfactory.

Change- Implementation of a program or plan to move the organization or its members to a more satisfactory state.
• In order for change to occur, people must have the capability and opportunity and motivation to change.
• Opportunities of innovation must be presented to employees for change to occur.

Refreezing- Condition that exists when newly developed behaviours, attitudes, or structures become an enduring part of the organization.
• Temporary.

Question 2

What are the 4 key dimensions critical to learning organizations?

Answer 2

 Vision / support.
 Culture.
 Learning systems / dynamics.
 Knowledge management / infrastructure.

Question 3

What are 3 issues in the change process?

Answer 3

Diagnosis:
 Change agents- Experts in the application of behavioural science knowledge to organizational diagnosis and change.

Resistance:
 Causes of resistance:
• Politics and self-interest.
• Low individual tolerance for change.
• Lack of trust.
• Different assessments of the situation.
• Strong emotions.
• A resistant organizational culture.
 How to reduce resistance:
• How transformational leaders tackle resistance:
o Be especially sensitive to when followers are ready for change.
o Unfreeze current thinking by installing practices that constantly examine and question the status quo.

Institutionalization.
 If the outcome of a change is evaluated favourably, the organization will want to institutionalize that change.

Question 4

Organizational Development (OD)

Answer 4

Planned, ongoing effort to change organizations to be more effective and more human.

Question 5

What are specific organizational development strategies?

Answer 5

 Team building:
•	Usually begins with a diagnostics session
 Survey feedback
 Total quality management (TQM) 
	Reengineering

Question 6

Total quality management (TQM)

Answer 6

Systematic attempt to achieve continuous improvement in the quality of an organization’s products or services.

Characteristics:
o Obsession with customer satisfaction.
o Concern for good relations with suppliers.
o Continuous improvement of work processes.
o Prevention of quality errors.
o Frequent measurement and assessment.
o Extensive training.
o High employee involvement and teamwork.

Tools utilized by TQM:
o Flowcharts of work processes.
o Pareto analysis.
 Collects frequency data on the cause of errors and problems, showing where attention should be directed for maximum improvement.
o Fishbone (Cause-and-effect) diagrams.
o Statistical process control.
 TQM places emphasis on reducing variation in performance over time.

Question 7

Survey feedback

Answer 7

• 2 approaches used to decide which questions a survey should ask: Pre-packaged, standardized surveys (Carefully constructed and permit comparisons with other organizations. Dangers = may neglect critical areas for special consideration.) and Custom-tailored surveys.
• Feedback is most effective when presented to natural working units in face-to-face meetings.
• Surveys are most beneficial when the results are reviewed with employees and when action is taken in response to the survey.

Question 8

Reengineering

Answer 8

Radical redesign of organizational processes to achieve major improvements in factors like time, cost, quality, or service.

Factors that prompt interest in reengineering:
o “Creeping bureaucracy”.
o New information technology.

Reengineering is oriented toward one or both of the following goals:
o Number of mediating steps in a process reduced, making the process more efficient.
o Collaborating among the people involved in the process enhanced.

Question 9

What are the methods of reengineering?

Answer 9

o Jobs are redesigned and usually enriched.
o Strong emphasis is placed on teamwork.
o Work is performed by the people most logically suited to the task.
o Unnecessary checks and balances are removed.
o Advanced technology is explained.

Question 10

What are problems with organizational development?

Answer 10

 OD efforts involve a complex series of changes.
 Novelty effects or the fact that participants receive special treatment might produce short-term gains that don’t persist over time.
 Self-reports of changes after OD may involve unconscious attempts to please the change agent.
 Organizations may be reluctant to publicize failures.

Question 11

Process innovations

Answer 11

New ways of designing products, making products, or delivering services

Question 12

Managerial innovations

Answer 12

Forms of strategy, structure, HR systems, and managerial practices that facilitate organizational change and adaptation.

Question 13

What are the three strages of the innovation process?

Answer 13

 Idea generation.
 Idea implementation.
 Idea diffusion.

Question 14

Idea champions

Answer 14

People who recognize an innovative idea and guide it through to implementation.

Question 15

Creative deviance

Answer 15

Defying orders by management to stop working on a creative idea.

Question 16

Gatekeepers

Answer 16

People who span organizational boundaries to import new information, translate it for local use, and disseminate it

Question 17

How can Internal communication be stimulated?

Answer 17

Can be stimulated with in-house training, cross-functional transfers, and varied job assignment.

Question 18

What is Diffusion and what can result from poor records of it?

Answer 18

Process by which innovation moves through an organization.

Poor records of diffusion are a result of:
• Lack of support and commitment from top management.
• Significant differences between technology or setting of the pilot project and those of other units in the organization, raising the argument that “it won’t work here”.
• Attempts to diffuse certain techniques rather than goals that could be tailored to other situations.
• Management reward systems that concentrate on traditional performance measures while ignoring success at implementing innovation.
• Union resistance to extending the negotiated “exceptions” in the pilot project.
• Fears that pilot projects begun in non-unionized locations could not be implemented in unionized portions of the firm.
• Conflict between the pilot project and the bureaucratic structures in the rest of the firm.

Question 19

What are  Factors critical to determining the rate of diffusion of many types of innovation?

Answer 19

• Relative advantage. -Diffusion is more likely when the new idea is seen as truly better than the one it replaces.
• Compatibility.
• Trialability.
• Complexity.
• Observability

Question 20

Describe the knowing-doing gap.

Answer 20

Managers know what to do but have issues implementing this knowledge in the form of action.

Why it occurs:
 Tendency for some organizational cultures to reward short-term talk rather than longer-term action.
 Many changes need cooperation among organizational units, but many organizations foster internal competition that’s not conductive to such cooperation.
 When managers do make changes, these changes sometimes fail because techniques are adopted without an understanding of their underlying philosophy.