Chapter 7 Smith & Graetz

Question 1

What are the most fundamental building blocks of an organization?

Answer 1

Its people

Question 2

What is the key motif throughout the psychological philosophy?

Answer 2

Minimizing the trauma and discomfort associated with organizational change.

Question 3

What does the psychological philosophy encourage

Answer 3

Employee involvement and empowerment in organizational decisions

Question 4

What are the key issues for employees?

Answer 4

• Loss of turf
• attachement
• meaning
• opportunity
• identity
• control

Question 5

What drives resistance to change?

Answer 5

Fear of loss drives resistance to change.

Question 6

How do Rational and systems philosophies view resistance?

Answer 6

as any structural, cultural, systemic, or strategic barrier that impedes either introduced or externally pressured change.

Question 7

How do psychological approaches view change?

Answer 7

Something that naturally draws a complex response.

The acceptance or rejection of change may be conceptualized as a continuum that stretches from commitment to resistance.

Commitment and resistance do not occur seperately.

Question 8

What unhelpful responses does change stimulate according to advocates of the psychological philosophy?

Answer 8

• Uncertainty,
• Lack of tolerance,
• Differences of opinion concerning the need for change,
• Threatened self-importance.

Question 9

What are common psychological solutions for overcoming negative but intuitive responses to change?

Answer 9

Empowerment,

participation,

education,

facilitation,

negotiation.

Question 10

Most of the time resistance proves counterproductive.

Which types of resistance do people show?

Answer 10

• Actively: where change is aggressively challenged
• Passively: where change is indirectly undermined

Aphaty exists somewhere between resistance and acceptance.

Question 11

Empowerment according to change psychologists aims at?

Answer 11

Aims to foster community, contribute to society, and help organisational members feel better about their work.

Empowerment strives less to give power away and more assumes that employees already have it.

Question 12

Why is empowerment troublesome to implement?

Answer 12

Employees may not want to be empowered if it leads to:

• more work,
• responsibility,
• risk

Some employees do not want the ‘power’ to make decisions if it means accepting accountabillity for the outcomes.

Question 13

Kirkman, Jones and Shapiro found in their research that employee resistance accompanies:

Answer 13

• perceived unfairness,
• increases in workloads,
• unclear role definition,
• uncertain managerial support,
• absence of team support.

Question 14

Another common approach is coaching and mentoring. What is coaching?

What is mentoring?

Answer 14

Coaching in a business refers to training, guidance and feedback about specific tasks and performance.

The coach in an organizational change context provides a special form of advice about personal improvement and behaviour.

Mentor can be from within or outside the workplace with the role to provide guidance through emotional support and tutoring.

Question 15

How can emotional intelligence be acquired

Answer 15

Through the development of four broad competencies and capabilities:

• self-awareness
• self-management
• social awareness
• relationship management

Question 16

What can organizational spirituality generate?

Answer 16

• honesty
• trust
• creativity
• morale
• satisfaction
• commitment
• financial performance

Question 17

What does organizational spirituality entail?

Answer 17

It inextricably connects with an individual’s search for meaning about their life, their work, and their organization.

Spans a ‘bridge’ of values and principles between organizations and employees.

Spiritual growth results, marked by maturity and enhancement of both inner virtues and their outward expression

Question 18

What does OD explores?

Answer 18

It explores the human side of change responses.

Question 19

To what in a change context does OD converges?

Answer 19

OD converges on:

the values of employees,

intentions of employees,

perceptions of employees,

whose personal experiences of change need to be positively managed.

Question 20

By its humanistic background, what does OD emphasizes?

Answer 20

The value of employees as a tremendous resource for learning, development, and productivity.

However, in order to reach their potential, employees must be placed in working environments that encourage self-determination, creativity and the opportunity for flexible responses to change.

Question 21

What is the difference between psychologically-fulfilled employees and those who remain unfulfilled?

Answer 21

Fulfilled employees create and adapt better to change than the unfulfilled employees

Question 22

What kind of environment does OD try to create?

Answer 22

It tries to create working environments that meet employees’ needs, support inter-personal relationships, promote satisfaction and fulfilment, and bolster commitment.

Establish an alignment between all organizational functions.

Question 23

What do OD agents do and what not?

Answer 23

They act as facilitators to help organizational members solve their own problems. Action research becomes the change intervention.

They do not dictate or direct change.

Question 24

Criticism on OD

Answer 24

• does not offer generic prescriptions for change.
• Fails to bridge the gap between theory and practice.
• Most tools and techniques makes implementation confusing.

Question 25

What does OL?

Answer 25

Marries the developmental side of OD with the cognitive side of the culture philosophy, and a smattering of critical theory, to create a psychological approach that emphasizes knowledge.

Question 26

Which two factors are featured by both OL and OD?

Answer 26

Communication and collaboration aiming for common inquiry, where organizational members recognize, question, and replace existing practices and behaviors.

Question 27

On what is OL concentrating?

Answer 27

OL concentrates on responses to change that emerge when exposing and challenging convention.

Question 28

Why is open dialogue the essence of OL?

Answer 28

The dialogue process shapes meanings and experiences into a shared ‘schema’ or frame of reference, Through common schema, OL helps to reveal how common knowledge guide behaviour through rules.

Question 29

For knowledge-intensive orgs, innovation, growth, and productivity gains rely upon:

Answer 29

Sharing and combining information.

Question 30

Why do people fail to choose optimally?

Answer 30

Because they do not accurately predict the consequences of the choices they are pressed to make,

Or they ignore their own predictions when they come to choose.

Question 31

What are impact biases?

Answer 31

Individuals’ tendencies to overestimate the effect of an emotional event while overlooking the contextual circumstances.

Question 32

What is the result of rationalizing events that did not turn out as planned or desired?

Answer 32

Despite a significant loss or failure associated with an emotionally charged event, individuals bounce back more resiliently than they had predicted.

Question 33

What are prediction biases?

Answer 33

Accompany skewed emotional arousal states.

Current states get projected into future imagined states, which reinforces why one should avoid food shopping when hungry.

Question 34

Distinction biases?

Answer 34

Occur in predictions made during different modes of evaluation as well as emotional states.

Romanticizing the past prior to change seems easier than contemplating the impact of failure to change at all.

Question 35

How do the way past decisions worked out affect our accuracy of future predictions?

Answer 35

Memory introduces a systemati bias disproportionately skewed in the direction of events that involved high emotional levels.

Question 36

Belief biases?

Answer 36

Memory plays a role in this.

Assumptions about what makes people happy operates as decision-making heuristics, or rules of thumb.

Question 37

What is the effect of having more choices?

Answer 37

Having more choices appears misleading, evidence suggests that more options can lead to worse experiences.

Question 38

Next to poor predictions what more causes decision-making problems?

Answer 38

Failures to act in accordance with predictions when made accurately. Rather then choosing wat they predict will lead to greater happiness, people may select the option that offers the greatest immediate appeal or that fits previous experience.

Impulsivity reflects a failure to predict long-term experience accurately.

Question 39

Psychology of sunk cost?

Answer 39

Change programmes that are going badly but are not abandoned. When heavy investments in time and resources have been involved, sunk cost thinking can lead change leaders to persist with poor decisions.

Question 40

Psychologists refer the most to which variable that affects predictions?

Answer 40

medium-maximization

When individuals resolve to focus on something other than the target outcome.