MANAGEMENT

Organizational Culture, Leadership and Change



Organizational Culture, Leadership and Change

Introduction

Business Dictionary (businessdictionary.com) defines organizational change as “transformation of a company or organization. Changes in an organization take place when a plan, strategy or main sections are changed”. D' Aunno et al, (2000) says that in order to increase an organizations operational efficiency, work routines are often developed based on generally accepted rules and systems organization wide. If one analyzes today's business environment it would be quite visible that it is highly risky and uncertainty prevails to a great extent. Changing the work routines and systems becomes difficult because set work activities generate tough in-house resistance to implement that change (Hannan & Freeman, 1984, pp.149-164). Similarly Granovetter (1985) puts forward the same idea that change becomes hard to implement because the organizations are religiously following the institutional and procedural construction of the environment in which they are based. The purpose of this paper is to look at the impact an organization's plan to implement change has on the culture.

Discussion

Theoretical Background

A very basic and frequently asked question in organizational literature is how firms and departments or groups within them adjust to changing conditions as their internal and external environment advances (Anonymous, n.d, p.1). A popular view that I came across states that change within an organization is mostly encouraged by the internal environment (Cyert & March, 1963). I once read in a magazine about a company who had to drastically change its internal process to keep up with its competition in a technology intensive industry. So the internal environment can be a problem or an abrupt change like decline in productivity, competitor's new strategies, technology advancement or new customer preferences and shifts in demand. This leads to the fact that following the set work routines lead to routinization and then efficiency but when an unaccounted problem surfaces the real weak spots are found in the underlying procedures and strategies of an organization and this ultimately leads to adjustment and change (Truijen et al, n.d, p.1). I think it will be safe to say that these set routines can be termed as an organization's culture. Staudenmayer, Tyre, and Perlow state that this presumption that problems incite change adjustment and adaption is well-designed, and is accepted across all the organizational literature. Nevertheless problems do not always lead to change, there have been many examples where organizations faced problems and instead of solving them they were disregarded and overlooked until these companies faced full-scale catastrophes (2002,pp. 583-597 ).

I mentioned Organizational Culture above. This is a very powerful thing when it comes to implementing change in an organization. One might ask how so? Simple explanation is that the organization's culture grows historically, strengthen beliefs and values and have slight nonetheless persistent effects on organizational member's actions and interpretations including organizational arrangements. So when change occurs all these factors can either help facilitate it or go against it.

For the purpose of better understanding I have broken the term Organizational Culture and ...