Slide 10.

WEEK 5
A framework for change
Approaches and choices
(Chapter 10)

Bernard Burnes, Managing Change, 5th Edition, © Pearson Education Limited 2009
Slide 10.2

Lecture 5 Learning outcomes

 Exploring the varieties of approaches to
change
 The contingency approach to change
 The new paradigms of change
 Organisational culture and change
 The Japanese approach to change
 Organisational Learning and change

Bernard Burnes, Managing Change, 5th Edition, © Pearson Education Limited 2009
Slide 10.3

Change is multi-disciplinary

As Stickland (1998: 14) remarks:

... the problem with studying change is that it

parades across many subject domains under
numerous guises……………………..

Bernard Burnes, Managing Change, 5th Edition, © Pearson Education Limited 2009
Slide 10.4

Varieties of change – 1

 Smooth incremental, covering slow,

systematic, evolutionary change.
 Bumpy incremental, pertaining to periods
where the smooth flow of change
accelerates.
 Discontinuous change, which is similar to the
punctuated equilibrium model.
Senior (2002)

Bernard Burnes, Managing Change, 5th Edition, © Pearson Education Limited 2009
Slide 10.5

Varieties of change – 2
 Top-down systemic change aimed at transforming
the organisation.
 Piecemeal initiatives devised and implemented by
departments or sections in an unconnected fashion.
 Bargaining for change where a series of targets
are jointly agreed between managers and workers,
but are pursued in a piecemeal fashion.
 Systemic jointism where managers and workers
agree a total package of changes designed to
achieve organisational transformation.
Storey (2002)

Bernard Burnes, Managing Change, 5th Edition, © Pearson Education Limited 2009
Slide 10.6

A Contingency approach

Turbulent times demand different responses in

varied circumstances. So managers and
consultants need a model of change that is
essentially a ‘situational’ or ‘contingency model’,
one that indicates how to vary change strategies
to achieve ‘optimum fit’ with the changing
environment. (Dunphy and Stace, 1993: 905)

Bernard Burnes, Managing Change, 5th Edition, © Pearson Education Limited 2009
Slide 10.7

Criticisms of contingency

 Ignores environmental manipulation

 Ignores managerial choice
 Ignores the difficulty of changing structures,
cultures and managerial behaviour
 Assumes that survival depends on being the
best.

Bernard Burnes, Managing Change, 5th Edition, © Pearson Education Limited 2009
Slide 10.8

Figure 10.1 Varieties of change

Bernard Burnes, Managing Change, 5th Edition, © Pearson Education Limited 2009
Slide 10.9

Figure 10.2 Change continuum

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Slide 10.10

Figure 10.3 Approaches to change

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Slide 10.11

Figure 10.4 Speed and focus of change

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Slide 10.12

Figure 10.5 A framework for change

Bernard Burnes, Managing Change, 5th Edition, © Pearson Education Limited 2009
Slide 10.13

Organisational change

Summary
 There are many approaches to change

 All tend to be situation-specific

 Managers can influence situational

constraints
 Organisations can exercise choice in:

 What to change
 How to change it
 When to change.

Bernard Burnes, Managing Change, 5th Edition, © Pearson Education Limited 2009
Slide 10.14

In search of new paradigms

(Chapter 3)

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Slide 10.15

Describing organizational culture

( Senior & Fleming)
 Artefacts
 Language in the form of jokes, metaphors, stories, myths
and legends
 Behaviour patterns in the form of rites, rituals, ceremonies
and celebrations
 Norms of behaviour
 Heroes
 Symbols and symbolic action
 Beliefs, values, attitudes
 Ethical codes
 Basic assumptions
 History
Bernard Burnes, Managing Change, 5th Edition, © Pearson Education Limited 2009
Slide 10.16

Culture–Excellence

Key figures
• Tom Peters and Robert Waterman
• Rosabeth Moss Kanter
• Charles Handy
Core concept:
Culture determines Performance.

Bernard Burnes, Managing Change, 5th Edition, © Pearson Education Limited 2009
Slide 10.17

Organisational culture

Why does it matter?

Peters and Waterman found a strong link between
excellence (good performance) and organisational
culture.

Bernard Burnes, Managing Change, 5th Edition, © Pearson Education Limited 2009
Slide 10.18

7 S framework

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Slide 10.19

Peters and Waterman

Eight key attributes of excellent organisations

1. Bias for action

2. Closeness to the customer
3. Autonomy and entrepreneurship
4. Productivity through people
5. Hands-on, value-driven
6. Stick to the knitting
7. Simple form, lean staff
8. Simultaneous loose–tight properties.

Bernard Burnes, Managing Change, 5th Edition, © Pearson Education Limited 2009
Slide 10.20

Rosabeth Moss Kanter (1989)

When giants learn to dance: mastering the challenges of
strategy, management, and careers in the 1990s
Kanter’s Post-entrepreneurial model
 Restructuring to find synergies
 Opening boundaries to form strategic alliances
 Creating new ventures from within – encouraging
innovation and entrepreneurship.

Bernard Burnes, Managing Change, 5th Edition, © Pearson Education Limited 2009
Slide 10.21

Charles Handy (1989)

The age of unreason
The world is changing, therefore, organisations
must change.

In future, organisations must be

 Knowledge-based

 Run by a few smart people

 Populated by a host of smart machines.

Bernard Burnes, Managing Change, 5th Edition, © Pearson Education Limited 2009
Slide 10.22

Charles Handy
Emerging organisations
• The Shamrock organisation
• 3 distinct groups of staff
• Core , Contractual Fringe, Flexible Labour Force
• The Federal organisation
• Network of individual organisations allied to
achieve a common purpose
• The Triple I organisation.
• Information , Intelligence, Ideas = added value

Bernard Burnes, Managing Change, 5th Edition, © Pearson Education Limited 2009
Slide 10.23

Changing organizational culture

to bring about organizational change
( Senior & Fleming)
 Assessing cultural risk

 The relevance of culture change to organizational change

(1) Ignoring the culture

(2) Managing around the culture
(3) Changing the culture
(4) Changing the strategy to match the culture

Bernard Burnes, Managing Change, 5th Edition, © Pearson Education Limited 2009
Slide 10.24

Summary

Organisations must promote

 Strong, flexible cultures

 Innovation and entrepreneurship

 Teamwork and individual enterprise and development

 Reward systems based on contribution and not position

 Brain power and not muscle power

 Flat, anti-hierarchical structures

 Small corporate and middle management staffs

 Tight control of a few key measures

 Continuous, radical change.

Bernard Burnes, Managing Change, 5th Edition, © Pearson Education Limited 2009
Slide 10.25

Criticisms

 Empirical evidence does not stand up

 Back to ‘one best way’
 Assumes all organisations face the same
problems and opportunities
 People are the chief asset but...
 are easily discarded
 compete with each other
 not all are treated the same way
 Culture is the great cure-all
 What about the Japanese?
Bernard Burnes, Managing Change, 5th Edition, © Pearson Education Limited 2009
Slide 10.26

The Japanese approach

Distinct features
 Personnel policies (soft)

 Business practices and work systems (hard)

Effectiveness comes from the ability to combine

soft and hard practices.

Bernard Burnes, Managing Change, 5th Edition, © Pearson Education Limited 2009
Slide 10.27

The Japanese approach (Continued)

Personnel policies (soft)

 Lifetime employment

 Internal labour market

 Seniority-based promotion and rewards

 Teamwork and bonding

 Enterprise unions

 Training and education

 Company welfarism.

Bernard Burnes, Managing Change, 5th Edition, © Pearson Education Limited 2009
Slide 10.28

The Japanese approach (Continued)

Designed to promote:
 Loyalty and gratitude

 Commitment

 Sense of security

 Hard work and improvement

 Co-operation not conflict

 Self-development.

Bernard Burnes, Managing Change, 5th Edition, © Pearson Education Limited 2009
Slide 10.29

The Japanese approach (Continued)

Business practices and work systems (hard)
 Long-term planning
 15 years
 Market growth
 Low dividends
 Low profits.

Bernard Burnes, Managing Change, 5th Edition, © Pearson Education Limited 2009
Slide 10.30

The Japanese approach (Continued)

Timeliness
 Fast product development
 JIT
 Right first time.
Quality
 Total quality approach
 Continuous improvement.

Bernard Burnes, Managing Change, 5th Edition, © Pearson Education Limited 2009
Slide 10.31

The Japanese approach

Summary
 Values and promotes loyalty
 Slow promotion

 Seniority principle

 Lifetime employment

 Paternalistic and deferential

 Slow, collective decision-making

Change is continuous, incremental, bottom-up but

within an overall company vision.

Bernard Burnes, Managing Change, 5th Edition, © Pearson Education Limited 2009
Slide 10.32

The Japanese approach

Criticisms
 Two-tier labour markets
 Lifetime employment = slavery
 Teamwork = coercive pressure
 Enterprise unions = exploitation
 Cannot accommodate globalisation and
workforce diversity
 Threatened by economic shocks.

Bernard Burnes, Managing Change, 5th Edition, © Pearson Education Limited 2009
Slide 10.33

Organisational learning

Some definitions
• Organizational learning is the process by which the
organization’s knowledge and value base changes,
leading to improved problem-solving ability and
capacity for action (Probst and Buchel, 1997: 15).
• A learning organization is an organization skilled at
creating, acquiring and transferring knowledge, and
at modifying behavior to reflect new knowledge and
insights (Garvin, 1993: 80).

Bernard Burnes, Managing Change, 5th Edition, © Pearson Education Limited 2009
Slide 10.34

Organisational learning (Continued)

 Organizational learning means the process of

improving actions through better knowledge and
understanding (Fiol and Lyles, 1985:803).
 An entity learns if, through its processing of
information, the range of its potential behaviors is
changed (Huber, 1991: 89).
 Organizational learning occurs through shared
insight, knowledge and mental models and builds on
past knowledge and experience, that is, on memory
(Stata, 1989: 64).

Bernard Burnes, Managing Change, 5th Edition, © Pearson Education Limited 2009
Slide 10.35

Organisational learning (Continued)

Positives
 A rich, multi-dimensional concept affecting many aspects

of organisational behaviour.
 An innovative approach to learning, to knowledge

management and to investing in intellectual capital.

 A new set of challenging concepts focusing attention on

the acquisition and development of individual and

corporate knowledge.
 An innovative approach to organisation, management

and employee development.

 Innovative use of technology to manage organisational

knowledge through databases and internet or intranets.

Bernard Burnes, Managing Change, 5th Edition, © Pearson Education Limited 2009
Slide 10.36

Organisational learning (Continued)

Negatives
 A complex and difficult set of practices, difficult to implement
systematically.
 An attempt to use dated concepts from change management
and learning theory, repackaged as a management consulting
project.
 A new vocabulary for encouraging employee compliance with
management directives in the guise of ‘self-development’.
 An innovative approach for strengthening management
control.
 A technology-dependent approach that ignores how people
actually develop and use knowledge in organisations.
(From Huczynski and Buchanan, 2001: 135)
Bernard Burnes, Managing Change, 5th Edition, © Pearson Education Limited 2009
Slide 10.37

Organisational learning
Summary
 Survival depends on the organisation learning (adapting)
at the same rate or faster than the environment changes.
 Learning must become a collective and not just an

individual process.
 There must be a fundamental shift towards systems (or

triple-loop) thinking by an organisation’s members.

 This gives an organisation the ability to adapt to,

influence and even create its environment.

Change comes from learning and learning comes from
change.

Bernard Burnes, Managing Change, 5th Edition, © Pearson Education Limited 2009
Slide 10.38

Organisational learning
Criticisms
 No agreed definition
 Scarcity of rigorous empirical evidence
 Organisations do not learn – people learn
 It requires the creation of organisational diversity
and consensus at the same time.

Bernard Burnes, Managing Change, 5th Edition, © Pearson Education Limited 2009