Changing Organizational Culture

Mats Alvesson, Stefan Sveningsson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317421030
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

How is practical change work carried out in modern organizations? And what kind of challenges, tasks and other difficulties are normally encountered as a part of it?

In a turbulent and changing world, organizational culture is often seen as central for sustained competitiveness. Organizations are faced with increased demands for change but these are often so challenging that they meet heavy resistance and fizzle out. Changing Organizational Culture encourages the development of a reflexive approach to organizational change, providing insights as to why it may be difficult to maintain momentum in change processes. Based around an illuminating case study of a cultural change programme, the book provides 15 lessons on the entire change journey; from analysis and design, to implementation and how organizational members should approach change projects.

This enhanced edition considers the most recent studies on organizational change practice, with new examples from businesses and the public sector, and includes one empirical study which uses the authors' own framework, enriching their practical recommendations. It also draws on the latest theoretical developments, including ideas of power and storytelling. Accompanying the text is an online pedagogic and research ideas guide available for course instructors and lecturers at Routledge.com.

Changing Organizational Culture will be vital reading for students, researchers and practitioners working in organizational studies, change management and HRM.

Part 1 Perspectives on organizational and cultural change

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315688404-1

According to most present-day writings on change we live in a time of turbulence and radical change. We are frequently informed about how changes in consumer and labour markets and in technologies, pressures of financial markets, globalization and new values and orientations from employees all act as key drivers for change. It is also often said that organizations must learn to adapt to changes or otherwise risk failure. This risk is regularly emphasized by contemporary authors of change. According to Beer and Nohria (2000: 133) modern societal conditions are exceptional in terms of change: ‘Not since the Industrial Revolution have the stakes of dealing with change been so high. Most traditional industries have accepted, in theory at least, that they must either change or die.’ Understanding and managing change has developed into a virtual industry, encompassing consultancy firms, management and leadership gurus, mass media, the business press, high-profile corporate executives, politicians and business schools, as well as management writings and management rhetoric and practice. In most writings, change is seen as good or necessary or both, often however with limited critical reflection on the subject matter (Sturdy and Grey 2003). Contemporary ideas of change stress that managers must be adept in working with planned organizational change as well as be responsive to changes in the environment. Efforts to change organizations are numerous and take a large proportion of the time and energy of many managers, staff and other employees. According to a British survey, 94 per cent of the investigated organizations experienced planned organizational change in 1997 (Ogbonna and Wilkinson 2003).

Many of the existing writings and projects of organizational change involves organizational culture in one sense or another. Culture is often seen as either the key issue to be changed or something that is crucial to take seriously in order to make change possible. Indeed, many authors of change suggest that a major reason for why organizational change efforts usually fail to materialize as planned is the frequent neglect of aspects of organizational culture (Balogun and Johnson 2004). In line with that, one could argue that few if any organizational changes are ‘culture-free’ or can navigate around culture. One author argues that ‘organizational change involves confronting the persistent pattern of behaviour that is blocking the organization from higher performance, diagnosing its consequences, and identifying the underlying assumptions and values that have created it’ (Beer 2000: 373). At minimum, culture may create problems and need to be considered. It is thus an important aspect and something to carefully consider for any person trying to change an organization.

Even twenty years after organizational culture was viewed as the ultimate way of addressing organizational problems – combining efficiency and focus with flexibility and engagement, through values and conviction – culture is still broadly seen as a key aspect of organizational competitiveness. In terms of the possibility of accomplishing change, Carl-Henrik Svanberg, CEO of Ericsson, has said that ‘culture always defeats strategy’. Lou Gerstner, former president of IBM, concluded that ‘I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game, it is the game’ (cited in Palmer et al. 2009: 358). Accordingly, the belief seems to be that, unless culture, at a minimum, is seen as an integral part of change, efforts at the latter will fail. Many organizations work with, plan or contemplate organizational culture changes – often as an important element in other changes. In the present book, we elaborate extensively on organizational change efforts where culture was claimed as a key theme. More specifically the book offers an in-depth investigation of a cultural change programme in a high-tech firm.

This means that we go beyond surface issues and look at the meanings, definitions and identities of the people involved. How change work is organized (and disorganized), how people define themselves and others, and what the entire project is basically about emerge as key themes to explore, and for actors in change projects to address and work with. Part of our case story is that key actors in many ways had little knowledge of what was going on and produced a mismatch between their self-understandings and the expectations of others. Developing new metaphors for change work is part of a suggested approach for how to deal with this in more thoughtful ways than seem to be common.

Understanding organizational change

Organizational change is a very broad area. It addresses a variety of time spans, interests in broad patterns (industrial/professional trends) or organization-specific transformations, and types of changes (technological, mergers, downsizing, etc.). There is a lot of variety concerning the theoretical perspective employed; some emphasize agents of change, others environmental driving forces. Here we will raise a few issues that are usually seen as important in understanding organizational change and position our study.

Change typically, but not necessarily, implies an interest in time. Some say that we cannot understand changes through a snapshot and instead emphasize a longitudinal approach (Pettigrew et al. 2001). Different time spans can be focused on, however. At one extreme we have an interest in how changes take place over history, and here a decade may be a fairly short unit of analysis. At the other extreme we have a limited time period, where one may even study what is happening over a few hours, for example when a work group develops a new idea or solution that subsequently affects its work. But sometimes time is disregarded and there is no focus on what is happening during the change process. In many studies of change projects it is actually common to focus on outcomes, for example on the difference between before and after the change intervention or period, thus downplaying what actually happens over time, that is, the process. Many authors observe that, although there is some recognition of the temporal (before and after changes) aspect, there is still a lack of studies focusing upon the micro-processes of change at work (Tsoukas and Chia 2002). This is probably a consequence of the significant requirements for close access and intensive ethnographic field work needed to follow change processes in depth. Consequently, in many change studies the actual change work is put in the notorious black box – before and after are studied, but not much is known about the actual change at work. Interviewing people at a distance may not say that much about what takes place.

We have been fortunate in terms of having very good opportunities of access to carefully and deeply follow change efforts in real time, and to interview a variety of people involved and observe different events.

Another interesting dimension concerns the presumed ‘need’ for change, including espoused or ‘real’ motives for change. As indicated above, it is frequently assumed that an organization, in the face of changing contextual circumstances, ‘must’ adapt or face great problems. However, we can also study people’s constructions of the ‘need’ for change or how rhetorical and other resources are mobilized in change projects. Many academics emphasize the need to address how contexts not only shape actions but also can be employed by individuals for pursuing certain changes. Researchers sometimes draw attention to how people interpret and make use of various logics and drivers behind changes. Ogbonna and Wilkinson (2003) for example noted how management in one firm emphasized new forms of competition and an increased need for customer orientation, while many of the employees interpreted the motives of top management as being about cutting costs in order to appeal to investors and analysts. Talk about new values was seen as a smokescreen for less noble considerations.

In this book we encounter an interesting example where there was some agreement that there were good reasons for change, but where initiative, action and engagement around the change programme still faced problems of mobilization.

A third issue connects to the significance of context and levels of analysis. An interest in organizational change may lead to an extension of contexts to broad trends or macro- and business-level changes, for example changes in an industry and how fashions affect an entire set of organizations at an aggregated level. At the other end, there may be a focus on micro-level changes in a specific part of an organization, for example on how a new manager or an emergent expression of discontent among a group of employees or a customer triggers reactions within a department.

We take a primary interest in specific events and acts, and follow the micro-processes of change efforts involving different groups as communicators, translators, interpreters and receivers of change messages. An idea is to take the varieties of people involved seriously. However, we also connect to broader trends in order to make change processes intelligible. It is for example important to relate the content of organizational change, such as customer orientation and quality programmes, to broader institutional and fashionable scripts and recipes. What is happening locally is sometimes best seen as imitations of trends and recipes circulating more broadly in business and amongst consultants.

Fourthly, a change typically involves a wide set of different phenomena and aspects, sometimes understood as the content of change: these may be the means and/or the outcomes of change projects. Candidates include everything from meanings, emotions and values to behaviours, technologies, systems and structures, as well as knowledge, objectives, strategies, vocabularies, systems, identities, social relations, networks and power relations. Many of these themes go together, and changes often involve several of these, but they may be given different emphasis – by the actors involved and by researchers trying to study what is happening.

This book mainly focuses on the cultural level, which means that we emphasize informal meanings, beliefs and understandings. We also consider values, but more in terms of how people relate to – and often become confused by – talk about (managerially invented) values, than what kind of values people in organizations ‘really’ have.

A fifth theme regards the possible interest in actors of change. Which actors are being focused on in the study? Are these institutions, such as the state, large companies initiating pressures on for example partners or suppliers to modify their operations, or industrial or professional bodies, or are local actors, for example a new top manager, of key interest? Or are we less interested in a centralized agent and want to know more about what is happening amongst those supposed to be targeted for change, their values, identifications or ways of working? There are many options. It is, of course, possible not to take any closer look at specific actors and their ways of initiating change or making sense of what managers try to encourage them to do. One may look at the operations of structural forces of change and their possible effects on behaviours and performances as if these worked in a ‘mechanical way’, thus black-boxing those supposed to create these new outcomes through modified practices.

Most research on organizational change tends to be management-centric, that is, focused on the management or the change agent’s point of view and actions (Bartunek et al. 2006), although there are some notable exceptions discussed in later chapters. Our approach is that it is very important to carefully consider the experiences, meanings and actions of all involved. It is not just those communicating objectives, messages and instructions who are of interest, but also those supposed to be affected by these, and how they interpret and accept, reject or downplay the goals, values and behaviours they are encouraged to take on board. Not only the managerial and subordinate, but also the intermediary, levels are worth taking seriously. We thus give some space to the sandwiched person’s, that is senior and junior middle-manager’s, point of view.

Finally, we have the matter of theoretical perspective. This of course is closely interrelated with many of the other issues: a population ecologist is typically interested in the overall outcomes of developments in large samples of organizations over long time periods and does not care about actors and their meanings. A sense-making theorist takes the opposite stance, and pays attention to how people reason and act based on their identity and perception of the situation. But many theoretical approaches can be aligned with a span of different empirical foci. Concentrating on a particular kind of empirical theme does not in detail determine the theoretical perspective used: one can study a change process in a specific organization at close range and use for example a functionalist, an interpretative, a critical or a post-structural approach. Studying how people interpret and respond to a change programme can, within an interpretative approach, emphasize sense-making, psychodynamic or culture theory. The study of organizations is a field with many theoretical options – not so suitable for the researcher with severe decision anxiety.

We are proceeding from an interpretative perspective, in which the meaning-creating activities and the cultural background of such activities are focused on. As will be made clear in the next section, anthropological culture theory is significant here.

Studying change in depth

There are thus many options within an interest in change and we will take one specific route. Our study focuses on what is happening in, rather than with, a specific organization. Geertz (1973) suggests that anthropologists do not study villages, but in villages, and we see this as inspirational also for organization researchers. As mentioned above, we are interested in process issues, not so much in before and after scores on various variables (attitudes, behaviours, performances). We are not neglecting the latter, but are mainly interested in following an entire organizational change process in real time. We are perhaps not so much interested in organizational changes as change efforts and what these consist of. As the case that is the focus of this book indicates, change efforts and change are hardly the same.

The concentrated approach we take means that a number of organizational actors are targeted. We pay secondary attention to structural forces, fashions or institutional changes, and focus on how people try to improve their organization in what they perceive to be some key respects. We note that our research subjects construct a certain organizational context in which they motivate change efforts, but we do not try to make any objective assessment of this construction. We study what people do when they engage in change work and what this seems to lead to in an organization. A possible strength of the study is that we have studied a broad spectrum of people involved in or exposed to, and more or less successfully called upon by the initiators of, the change efforts: in the text we will encounter top- and middle-managers, HRM people, consultants and low-level employees. We have had direct access to change activities and have listened to the thoughts, intentions, sense making and responses of people involved in and/or targeted by the change project.

The change project focused on culture or, rather, what those i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustration
• Preface
• Part 1 Perspectives on organizational and cultural change
• Part 2 Change work in practice – a close-up study
• Part 3 Crucial issues in cultural change work
• Part 4 Getting into the substance of organizational change work
• Bibliography
• Index