Growth of Global and Regional

¶ … growth of global and regional markets, the influx of new diverse personnel at all levels, the addition of new media and marketing, and the need to control costs through innovative production and distribution methods, businesses are finding increasingly that, if they are unable to change effectively to meet new or altered demands in the marketplace, they cannot compete. Lawler and Worley (2006) argue that "change is all around us and is occurring more and more rapidly. It demands the attention of every executive and every organization that wants to survive" (p.2). In order to address the need for organizational change and management processes which facilitate that change, there have been a number of different perspectives offered for best practices. Lawler and Worley, for example, argue that the very structure of an organization is critical. They claim that organizations which are set up with fluid system and flexible values are best able to achieve the kinds of change and gain the kinds of short-term competitive advantages that allow for current success while still providing for the possibility of change going forward in order to achieve new competitive advantages in whatever marketplace changes tomorrow brings. However, even with such structural considerations, it seems necessary to have a psychology component which is able to determine how people are best made conducive to and accommodating of change. Because ultimately change must come at the individual level if the various parts of the organization are to come together as an organized whole, the question therefore, is: what makes people willing to change in a business organization?

Argyris (1993) offered a view of rationally-driven behavior modeling to claim that in properly developing the knowledge processes and content by which organizations operate, change can be managed effectively. This view stressed rational choice thinking and indicated that people will act when they see an idea that makes sense. However, more recent theories claims that knowledge-based theories alone cannot properly account for the willingness and capacity of workers and managers alike to accept and facilitate change in an organization. Kotter and Cohen, for example, claim that "People change what they do less because they are given analysis that shifts their thinking than because they are shown a truth that influences their feelings" (p. 1). This view seems, to this management student, to be the more correct one, because it combines both knowledge and emotional buy-in, to achieve a critical commitment that will not be present if emotional connection is neglected.

The strengths of the view offered by Kotter and Cohen, are that it incorporates more of the whole personality of the person who is being asked to change. Modern psychology seems to indicate that there is a connection between physiology, psychology, emotion, and other aspects of human behavior that is inseparable. Personality seems, according to the modern view, to consist of more than just knowledge separate from other forces of identity, or even knowledge acting in loose conjunction with these other forces. Rather, a holistic view of the person indicates that rational and economic thinking are coupled with, sometime driving and sometimes following, these other forces. 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.