Changing an Organization's Culture

Changing an Organization's Culture

Introduction

The vision of Transformation (pseudonym for the organization being studied), a U.S. market leader in pediatric nutritionals and a world leader in adult nutritionals, is to be the worldwide leader in providing superior and trusted nutritional products and related healthcare products that advance the quality of life for people.

For Transformation, science has been the core of its business. Transformation's commitment to excellence has made it one of the world's most respected names for nutritional and related healthcare products. As described last year on Transformation's web site, health care professionals, parents, and health-conscious adults continue to look to Transformation for quality products. Transformation's businesses include: adult nutrition, pediatric nutrition, healthy living, pharmaceuticals, metabolic products, and enteral devices.

Transformation traditionally operated with a silo mentality, where functional business areas maintain an internal focus, look out for their best interests, and do not communicate with the other functional business areas. This has prevented collaboration across the organization.

Every department was essentially left alone to determine their own systems and processes, regardless of the impact upon the remainder of the organization. Science, thus Research & Development (R&D) ran the company and the prevailing philosophy was “build it and they will come.”

Planned Change Theories

Planned change is usually a solution to a problem, or a result of dissatisfaction with the status quo. Planned change is usually triggered by the failure of people to create continuously adaptive organizations (Dunphy, 1996). Oftentimes, planned change initiatives focus on just surface-level changes, essentially leaving organizational assumptions, values, and beliefs unexplored (Argyris & Schon, 1978). There are many change models that are used to aid practitioners in implementing change. These models can be broken into two types of change theories or approaches that organizations can use: radical and incremental. Within each of these approaches there are various models and/or processes.

Radical change approaches include, but are not limited to, six sigma, quality function deployment, and re-engineering. Radical change models are used to jump-start an organization and are also used when a culture change is required. In a traditionally Midwestern family business atmosphere, change is likely to be more heavily resisted than in other organizations because the feelings surrounding the change tend to be deeper and more intense, and previous research shows that family values, goals, and relations deeply influence strategic change in family-oriented firms (Dyer, 1994).

Research also shows that resistance derails most change efforts, with the most notable obstacle being management behaviors not supportive of the change (O'Dononvan, 2003).In a planned change effort, change agents are professionals who influence and implement the change; they are critical to the success of a change effort (Vago, 1999).

Collaboration and Cooperation

Collaboration as a value is a cornerstone upon which many successful organizations are being rebuilt. During a review of the literature on collaboration and cooperation, the researcher found that although these two terms are often used interchangeably, many authors identified a meaningful difference between the two. The researcher is using the terms collaboration and cooperation interchangeably or ...