Resistance to change in organizational contexts

Organizational Culture & Change

Conglomerate, Inc.

According to the organizational model of the ideal workplace culture, positive workplace cultures are humanistic and encouraging; affiliative; achievement-oriented and self-actualizing. Unfortunately, the workplace culture of Conglomerate, Inc. In practice is oppositional, avoidant, and perfectionistic. This suggests that employees feel that they are not treated as valuable assets by management and that managers avoid rather than embrace input from employees. It also suggests that there is little room for a "safe space" for employees to make mistakes to learn, grow, and generate new and potentially valuable ideas. Rather, employees are being held to rigid and unyielding standards that might not be reflective of reality. Workers feel as if they must stifle their real opinions to fit in.

Positive workplace cultures, in contrast, solicit information from employees and create bonds of affiliation between management and all workers. Humanism means instilling a relationship founded upon mentoring and growth rather than upon competition and fear. Of course, competition is a part of most workplaces but the competition should be against one's self, ideally, rather than at the expense of other employees. If workers are pitted against one another in a negative atmosphere, ultimately this is counter-productive to the aims of the larger organization. Significantly, one of the most significant gaps is between the positive ratings of "affiliation" of the ideal vs. The rating of the organization in this attribute in actual fact.

The organization must move from its current "Theory X" mode of management to a "Theory Y" motivational mode. According to the theoretical overview of Douglas McGregor, "Theory X assumes that employees are naturally unmotivated and dislike working, and this encourages an authoritarian style of management. According to this view, management must actively intervene to get things done," often by using a "carrot and stick" approach ("Theory X and Theory X," 2014). In contrast, "Theory Y expounds a participative style of management that is de-centralized. It assumes that employees are happy to work, are self-motivated and creative, and enjoy working with greater responsibility" ("Theory X and Theory X," 2014). Theory X approaches tend to use incentives like raises, promotions, and sanctions, assuming that workers can only be motivated by tangible assets. There is little solicitation of input from lower-level employees. In contrast, Theory Y approaches offer workers more pleasant working environments and the ability to shape the future of the organization in a positive way. Theory Y assumes that workers want to make a contribution and strives to create the necessary conditions so they can do so. The organization must move closer to a Theory Y method of doing things even if no workplace can ever be said to completely and purely embody an ideal.

Section 2: Resistance to change

According to the three-step model of change management, the first step of every change management process is to "unfreeze" the mindset of the employees who will act as the agents of change. Employees must be convinced of the need for change to abandon their traditional standard operating procedures. Unfreezing may require presenting employees with facts and figures justifying the change; creating a vision and a mission for the needed changes that is psychologically and spiritually inspiring; and making a case to workers that it is in their personal self-interest to change. "Key to this is developing a compelling message showing why the existing way of doing things cannot continue. This is easiest to frame when you can point to declining sales figures, poor financial results, worrying customer satisfaction surveys, or suchlike: These show that things have to change in a way that everyone can understand" ("Lewin's change management model," 2014). If there is a lack of hard data and persuasive anecdotal evidence, the change process will be much harder to embark upon.