Leading Cultural Change

The Theory and Practice of Successful Organizational Transformation

James McCalman, David Potter

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780749473044
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Gestione
• Index: Business

With coverage of the major theories and concepts alongside diagnostic tools and a practical framework for implementation, Leading Cultural Change will help the reader analyse and diagnose their current organizational culture, become aware of the key challenges and how to overcome them and learn how to adapt their leadership style, ensuring they are fit to lead a cultural change programme. Taking in core topics such as change context, language and dialogue as a key cultural process and the change team process, it uses a longitudinal case study of Cordia, a public sector organization transitioning into an LLP, to enhance learning and understanding. Leading Cultural Change is a unique text, rooted in behavioural sciences, which explores the topic as an organizational necessity to achieving sustained competitive advantage.

PART 1 Leading cultural change. Theoretical perspectives

01 Cultural change management It’s not all recipes you know!

Introduction

Much like cooking boeuf bourguignon, successful organizational change requires that you use all of the ingredients, inject lots of care and passion, and don’t take any shortcuts (Therese S Kinal, Real Business, May 2013.) As technology and social reform punctuate society with ever-increasing frequency managers have to be able to manage change effectively. This book is not concerned with everyday change: it is concerned with exceptional change; it is concerned with cultural change. The issue for managers is that in the main they lack a conceptual and practical framework of change that enables them to make a distinction between cultural and non-cultural change. Rather than focusing on the recipes and ideas that dominate the popular literature (Alvesson and Sveningsson, 2008) this chapter will take a different approach and seek to examine deeper concepts. In doing so, we will:

• Define what we mean by change and cultural change management.

• Describe the nature and utility of first- and second-order change and illustrate what we mean by these.

• Focus attention on the difference between cultural change that is reproductive or adaptive and that which is transformative.

• Define what we mean by cultural paradigm.

• Introduce the notion of cultural change as a wicked problem.

• Introduce change as a social process based on Lewin’s three-stage model.

These are topics that the change manager needs to be familiar with. The chapter examines the ideas that we have found to be most relevant and it is our intention here to move the discussion of change away from recipe-driven perspectives towards a deeper analysis. By doing so we hope to provide both managers and students with a more fluent grasp of cultural change language and practices. The themes that we cover in this chapter will give readers a deeper appreciation of complexity and enable them to make a distinction between different kinds of change and to grasp cultural change as both a concept and a practice.

Organizational change is enormously complex. There are over 770 million references to it on the internet as people seek solutions to their change problems. However, complexity leads to shortcuts as managers attempt to reduce the core concepts into ‘manageable agendas’. This over-simplification of the diversity of change work appears to revolve around 10 principles (Alvesson, 2002):

1 Communicate the case for change.

2 Push and pull are effective strategies.

3 Involve people in the change process.

4 Build a coalition.

5 Develop a change vision.

6 Break the change process down into discrete stages.

7 Design a pilot.

8 Post pilot evaluate outcomes.

9 Launch the change programme.

10 Celebrate group achievements.

Managers only have to apply these prescriptions and successful change will occur. The problem with this view is that rational and linear models imply a simplicity that doesn’t exist (Alvesson, 2002, Beech and MackIntosh, 2012, Buchanan and McCalman, 1989). The sequential model does provide a framework to guide change management efforts; however, if the change manager has no underlying construct of theory then the likelihood is mediocre success or relative failure (Collins, 1998). The main problem facing those who are involved in cultural change work is a lack of relevant language and ideas that are specific to change projects. Cultural change is concerned with changing the symbolic nature of the meaning systems that managers employ to make sense of their environments. This is a very personal and introspective process for managers. It stands in sharp contrast to non-cultural change that managers can, in the main, stand apart from in a very calculating and overtly rational way. Therefore, the first obstacle for cultural change managers is to make a distinction between what constitutes cultural change and what does not.

Change management defined

Regardless of whether one is involved in cultural or non-cultural change work, the basic definition of the change process is the same for both activities. We define general change management as follows.

---

The process through which an object of management attention is moved from one state to another in a planned and intentional manner.

---

This definition is helpful because it provides a heightened sense of focus concerning the object of change, both in its current form and in its desired future form. It is also helpful because it helps to maintain a discipline that is critically important, which is concerned with explaining what it is one is trying to change, what its current state is, and what state you wish to change it into. This can be problematic for cultural change work because sometimes it is more convenient to state that the idea is to change culture at work. This is not very helpful and we would be better off asking:

• What precisely is it in cultural terms that needs changing?

• What does the cultural change target look like in the present moment?

• What are the organizational implications of the current cultural variable?

• What changes in its form are required and why?

• How is one to set about changing its form to ensure it performs a different function?

• What will this cultural variable look like after it has been changed?

These are just some of the kind of critical change management questions that should dominant the thinking of cultural change managers. To be able to handle any of these questions competently one must start with developing a definition of cultural change. We define cultural change as follows.

---

A fundamental change in the meanings that cultural members attribute to their values and assumptions, which leads to a shift in the nature of cultural themes in use and the expressive content of the cultural paradigm.

---

This definition is packed with significant concepts that will be discussed in some depth in Chapter 3, which is dedicated to building a model of culture. We must stress though that change work involves changing what Smircich (1983a) calls ‘meaning systems’; what Johnson (2000) refers to as the ‘cultural web’ of the organization; Levy and Merry (1986) refer to as the ‘cultural paradigm’; and what Opler (1945) and Spradley (1980) refer to as ‘cultural themes’. When defining cultural change, Alvesson and Sveningsson (2008: 42) state that: ‘A cultural change is not that management tries to impose new behaviours (or talk), but a change of the ideas, values and meanings of large groups of people.’ Changing culture thus involves changing what people value and the assumptions they hold in relation to the nature of their experience. These assumptions provide a value framework that produces the cultural paradigm of the organization. Our notion of cultural change would involve diagnosing the assumptions, values, cultural themes and related paradigm that constrains and enables the expressive capacity of members for deconstruction and transformation.

It is important to differentiate between ‘cultural change work’ and ‘non-cultural change work’. One way to do this is to make a distinction between three types of cultural change:

Cultural reproduction

Cultural adaptation

Cultural transformation

Cultural reproduction and cultural adaptation belong to the category of change work known as ‘first-order change’ (Levy and Merry, 1986). Cultural reproduction involves the repetition of established ways of doing things as business expands or if one is trying to solve problems using a particular methodology that worked before (Bourdieu, 1991). In these activities the organization would simply reproduce the architecture of the operating culture that they know and understand.

Cultural adaptation involves an existing activity being changed in terms of its form but not involving any change to the meaning attached to the change target. For example, if we take the standard operating process for purchasing in the catering industry, an electronic purchasing system (EPS) does away with traditional paper work. This process does not involve cultural transformation, nor can it be called cultural reproduction; it is best considered as a good example of adaptation. The industry has adapted cultural practices to keep up with trends; this involves new technology and slight changes to process but does not fundamentally change cultural problem-solving methods related to procurement issues.

Cultural transformation is the main focus of this book. It involves the identification of elements of the organizational culture that are deemed redundant and the changing of organizational form. We would describe cultural transformation as a process that would change the meanings that members attach to a phenomenon to subsequently invoke a change in their attitudes. This change process would involve generative dialogue between members to explore the assumptions and values that were formed as a result of the interpretive process that produced the established meaning systems. The attitudes that are formed will drive social strategies and behaviours towards the phenomenon of interest. This is complex and difficult to manage.

For example, in the case study organization in Part 2 of this book, there was a cultural problem that involved managers defining staff absence as a health issue and not as a conduct issue. If absence is defined as a health issue then the process centres on caring for staff members and affording them every opportunity to return to work only when they are properly fit to do so. This cultural theme may also produce other cultural themes such as an inability to apply management controls to absence cultures and apply stricter conduct standards that aim to target habitual absence cases. The change problem may involve literally thousands of staff and hundreds of managers and supervisors. The problem for the organization was how to change the meaning attributed by managers to absence from a health perspective to one that also considered repeated absence as a conduct issue. This change process can only happen through generative dialogue about underlying assumptions, ie we are a caring organization. The strategies may involve absence-counselling sessions that almost entirely focus on empathetic models of behaviour. Cultural transformation involves changing the symbolic meanings that managers and staff place on absence, the assumptions and values that emerge and the attitudes and social strategies that are the final output of this meaning-making process.

First- and second-order change

It would be helpful for cultural change managers if they could access a model or a framework that assisted them in making a distinction between non-cultural and cultural change work. Levy and Merry (1986) consider both cultural reproduction and adaptation as ‘first-order’ changes concerned with operating within the established cultural system. In contrast, they consider cultural transformation as ‘second-order’ change. It is important that the change leader can make a distinction between these categories of change work.

First-order change

First-order change is fairly unreflective and spontaneous. It emerges from established cultural norms and thus is a product of previous thinking and does not need new thinking or cultural sense making to occur. Cultural change involves the creation of new thoughts; it involves dialogue with enough people to support the acceptance of the proposal to change aspects of established cultural themes in use (Dixon, 1998; Isaacs, 1999; Yankelovich, 1999).

With first-order change:

• Adjustments are made within the current organization structure.

• Focus on repeating the same processes or slight adaptation.

• Restoring balance (homeostasis).

• Non-transformational.

• New learning is not required.

By way of contrast, second-order change:

• New way of seeing things.

• Irreversible.

• Often begins through the informal system.

• Transformation to something quite different.

• Requires new learning.

Levy and Merry (1986: 5) define first-order change as ‘minor improvements and adjustments that do not change the system’s core, and occur as the system naturally grows and develops’. In a similar vein, Smith (1982: 318) differe...