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When economists find that people can be made to act against their own self-interest, or politicians find that voters can be moved to action even if they won't benefit from it, or marketing analysts find that consumers' buying patterns can't be explained by rational choice models alone, it seems that there is something physical and emotional behind these dissonant events. Knowledge and rationality, while certainly important and perhaps even primary, is not entirely complete as an explanatory device for why people act. Knowledge is, it seems, necessary, but not sufficient, as a tool for making predictions about why people act. Ultimately, something else is required.
The view of Kotter and Cohen offers perhaps the most important piece of what that something else is: emotion is the driving force behind the rational, the unconscious mind behind the conscious mind. In order to get people to act on change needs within an organization, managers should develop rational approaches that appeal to their workers' emotional identities. The strengths of the view are that it recognizes the whole person and provides both information and connection capacity, so that the worker can know the reason for the change and can also buy into that reason on his or her own terms.
Of course, there is a danger in this view, as well, which consists of the possibility that management will simply make emotional appeals, dressed up in superficial ideas that do not hang together well (or coherently). In other words, managers, by knowing the importance of influencing...
The use of political considerations could be, for example, exchanged with knowledge considerations, and a manager could make appeals which show how a group within a department ought to change in order to gain the favor of a new boss, regardless of how well this fit in with overall company plans. Such appeals to emotion with other elements of rational choice mixed in, show this view ripe for possible misuse. However, such a move seems destined to fail just as certainly as an approach which emphasizes rationality to the exclusion of emotion. If management wants to move organizations in the proper direction, it seems key that both knowledge and emotion have to be coupled. As Kotter and Cohen formulize their explanation workers have to be shown a "truth" which influences their feelings. Managers who want to succeed in the long-term must appeal both to their workers rational minds and to the emotional hearts.
References
Argyris, C. (1993). Knowledge for action: a guide to overcoming barriers to organizational change (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass)
Kotter, J., and Cohen D., (2002), The heart of change: real-life stories of how people change their organizations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press)
Lawler, E., and Worley, C., (2006). Built to change: how to achieve sustained organizational effectiveness (San Francisco: John Wiley and Sons).
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