Organizational Change Agents Research Articles

The KAI as a Survey‐feedback Instrument

The Kirton Adaption‐Innovation Inventory was introduced as a survey‐feedback instrument during a team development workshop. The instrument proved easy to apply and interpret. Furthermore, the intervention appeared to provide the participants with a powerful means of dealing with misunderstandings and in‐group conflicts. The instrument deserves further trials by organisational change agents and trainers.

Designing from ill-defined problems

The majority of current information systems design methodologies imply an oversimplified consideration of organizational context. This suggests that it is unproblematical to requirements analysis. This paper argues that organizational contexts are complex situations and information systems design needs to deal with this at the requirements analysis stage. Also, the role of the designer as organizational change agent needs to be recognized as an addition to the role as information engineer. Methodologies for design can provide guidelines for such a recognition which allow for an improved management of the design process. In this paper, a case study is used to illustrate how soft systems methodology can be used for such. This use is then expanded to consider an addition which is the development of metaphor-based modelling. This was found to be helpful in dealing with an ill-defined and highly political organizational problem. The role of the information systems designer as change agent is reflected upon in the light of this study.

The fidelity‐adaptation debate: Implications for the implementation of public sector social programs

The modified Research, Development, and Diffusion (RD&D) model, as exemplified by change agents in federal organizations, was examined as a viable strategy for disseminating social program innovations. This study of seven nationally disseminated education and criminal justice projects was designed to refine the methodology for measuring innovation implementation. We measured program fidelity, reinvention, and effectiveness in a diverse set of program settings. Results of the research suggested that high-fidelity adopters tended to produce more effective implementations than low-fidelity adopters. Local modifications to the model were unrelated to effectiveness, whereas local additions to the model tended to enhance effectiveness. Findings supported the utility of the modified RD&D model of innovation dissemination with public sector social programs.

Developing Organisational Life: Participation at Work

Preston and Post described three stages of organisational and management development, which they refer to as the “three managerial revolutions”. The first managerial revolution was the appearance of management itself as a specialised function within “hierarchical organisations”. The second revolution, “professionalisation”, was encouraged by the growth in industrial organisations and the complexity of managerial tasks. The third and contemporary revolution is “participation”. Participation means, as Preston and Post define it, “the inclusion of persons and groups involved and concerned with the diverse outcomes of managerial activity as participants in the managerial process”. We see daily examples of the movement toward participation in industrial life, in the form of participative management within organisations, government pressure for greater worker participation in decision‐making, worker co‐operatives, etc. This third managerial revolution has enormous consequences for the development of managerial and organisational life. I would like to describe in this article where I think organisational change agents can play their part in this form of management development.

The Human Factors Specialist as Organizational Change Agent

Organizational development (OD) as an approach to change, has provided a variety of techniques to systematically plan and manage change in an organizational context. Typically the locus of organizational change is in the upper echelons of management. The success of many OD interventions rests primarily on interpersonal factors and people-to-system factors characterized by concern for a climate of openness and trust and participation in organizational activities at all levels. These activities include the determination of goals and the seeking of agreement on the direction the organization would take in the near term.

Consultation with the police: The psychiatrist as organizational change agent

Psychiatric consultation with the police has been recognized as a valid goal of community psychiatry. 1 The role of the police in community mental health has been explored by others. 2–4 In April 1972, the author was hired as part-time Psychiatric Consultant by the City of Miami Police Department. The position was initially funded by a two year grant from the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA). It was to be the first step in a broad-ranging program aimed at overhauling the entire structure and function of this department. The goal of this program was to convert a traditionally stratified, change-resistant city police agency to a flexible, smoothly functioning organization that would be responsive to the ever-changing needs and demands of the public it serves. Since very few police departments utilize the services of a psychiatrist or attempt major organizational change, the author's role and function were not predetermined. Rather, they were left open-ended, to be carved out empirically based on his day-to-day experiences and his relationships with personnel at the various rank levels within the department. What follows is a discussion of the climate within the police department during the author's tenure, the input of the consultant into innovative programs, the impact of the author's role on the organizational change process and some guidelines for the consultant to an organization undergoing major change and/or development.

Confessions of an Organizational Change Agent

This is an account of errors made by the author in his role as organiza tional change agent working as a process consultant. For each error there is an illustrative case study in which he was directly involved. Although some of the case studies could be used to illustrate more than one error, this is avoided in order to provide more examples. The errors include initiating change from the bottom up, creating a change overload, raising expectations beyond what is possible, allowing inappropriate attach ment, becoming trapped in one part of the organization, changing only a subsystem, inappropriately using behavioral interventions instead of structural interventions, losing professional detachment, assuming that a change is needed, and failing to seek help.

Guidelines for Overcoming Empirically Identified Evaluation Problems of Organizational Development Change Agents

Several authors have written about the problems of conducting organizational development (OD) evaluations, but two inadequacies still remain. First, many of these problems are quite likely indigenous to the situations experienced by the writer in his evaluations, and they may not be widely applicable or generalizable to a large number of practitioners. Thus, one may be concerned as to whether these are the problems that OD practitioners can expect to experience in their OD evaluations. The second inadequacy is that the problems reportedly experienced by OD practitioners are rarely found in the literature on OD evaluations. In fact, only one or two problems are generally discussed, and these problems have been experienced by the researcher in a specific evaluation. Due to these inadequacies, a survey questionnaire, the OD Survey Questionnaire, was developed to ascertain the evaluative problems of OD practitioners. With the members of the OD Network serving as the survey population, questionnaires were mailed to 269 members. We classified 101 of the returned questionnaires from change agents as usable responses because the respondents indicated that they had previously conducted OD efforts. A total of 107 evaluative problems were identified and subsequently clustered into three problem categories, i.e., methodological, administrative, and miscellaneous problems. Subproblems of each category are discussed and some guidance for dealing with each problem is offered for those practitioners concerned with OD evaluation.

The Triumph and Failure of Albert Speer's Administrative Genius: Implications for Current Management Theory and Practice

In this article the authors explore Albert Speer's (Hitler's Minister of Armaments and War) theories of organizational change "with the specific purpose of framing and accentuating the anomaly that organizational change agents such as Albert Speer represent in technological societies. On the one hand, Speer was an exponent of some of the most advanced, participative, and 'humanistic'... management theories being endorsed today. At the same time, however, he utilized these theories and practices to promote the goals of one of the most inhumane societies in the history of mankind.. The crimes of the Third Reich are essentially modern crimes, made possible by 20th century technology, which holds within it both great promise and great danger for human values." The authors discuss the limitations of present forms of organizational change and suggest new directions and perspectives for an emerging theoretical base.

THE PETER PRINCIPLE: PERSONAL OR ORGANIZATIONAL INCOMPETENCE?

AbstractThis article proposes that incompetence in management may not be explained so much by the ‘Peter Principle’, i.e. by terminal weaknesses of personnel in faulty promotion systems, as it is by the organizational climate in which managers perform, i.e. by outmoded supervisory styles and limiting structural relationships. This alternative explanation is supported by Townsend's popular book, Up the Organization,1 where Theory X styles of leadership, in some combination with bureaucratic elements of structure, are seen as impairments in modern organizations.This contention argues that organizational change agents must operate in tandem upon perceptions and attitudes as well as structural properties to maintain effectiveness ‐ embarking on either skill and sensitivity training alone or mandating authority and task changes is insufficient. In addition, leadership flexibility and structural variety must provide alternative options across different task units if both short‐run efficiency and long‐term relevance are to be generated for the organization.Finally, organization survival is viewed as a function of managerial performance as determined by structure, including the promotion system, and by level of humanism of the climate, especially motivational stimuli. Within all of this, managerial effectiveness is considered to be influenced by incumbent conceptualizations of goals and capacities of the organization and of his own ‘self’ within that system. Concepts of self, in turn, are determined by historical notions associated with work and authority, as well as by various socialization processes in the organization, e.g. training, super‐vision and general psychological conditioning. Accordingly, the matrix design of organizations and the contingency theory of leadership are offered as vehicles for tentatively re‐conceptualizing the nature and form of collective behavior. Matrix and contingency theories focus upon modern, complex organizational structures and varied superior‐subordinate relationships rather than upon man's instrumental performance, as with the Peter Principle, in explaining managerial inadequacies.

Developing Social Work Power in a Medical Organization

■ Social workers who would be change agents in medical organizations must understand how power is distributed, how decisions are made, and how changes would affect other elements of the organization. They must then proceed in a systematic way to develop and apply power in order that social work knowledge and values may have their appropriate effect on the delivery and deployment of medical services. ■