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Macro Perspectives of Change (11-2-2013).md

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"Curb your enthusiasm."

Evolutionary approaches.

variation---selection---retention

  • population scarcity
  • environmental selection: some things are going to fail.
  • competition.

Downs

  1. Shrinking violet syndrome
    • defensive posture to hold market
    • after encountering a personal failure
  2. Superman syndrome
    • infringe on other tasks
    • leads to shrinking violet
    • idea that company can do anything
    • happens after major successes

Kotter and Heskett, Cultural approach

Three Types of Cultures

  1. Strong culture
    • Has existed in the US for a long time
    • Generally has a founder with an uncanny insight into the market
    • Imposed philisophical outlook on the company
    • Works as long as the market doesn't change
  2. Strategically appropriate culture
    • Partially market driven
    • People who founded the company did market research
    • Stopped doing market research after start
    • Works as long as the market doesn't change
  3. Adaptive culture
    • Constant Change
    • Constantly assessing the market and making changes based on that
    • Must hire the right kind of employees
    • Requires an incredible amount of effort

Dialectic

Encourage confrontation and conflict over ideas. Conflict creates good ideas.

thesis vs. anthesis---conflict---synthesis

  1. Diversity
  2. Confrontation
  3. Conflict

Downs

  1. Forces of inertia
    • Sunk costs
    • Size/cost of innovation
    • Self-interest
  2. Force of change
    • Desire to a good job.
    • Desire for aggrandizement
    • Self-defense (If you don't change, you'll die.)

Paradox of Group Decision-making

Anything that increases the quality of decision making decreases the chances of implementation.

  1. Task conflict
    • Group spends all of its time arguing about solutions
  2. Emotional conflict
    • Anger towards other people during the deliberation
    • Causes people to actively or passively defeat this decision
  3. Solutions
    • dialectical
      • The reasons that groups don't work in open conflict is a perception of coteries.
      • Define subgroups with specific tasks, breaking natural coteries.
      • Assumes that subgroups can reach a decision easier.
      • Doesn't work.
    • devil’s advocate
      • Assign someone specifically to be a critic
      • Removes it from being personal
      • Only kind of works
    • consensus

Attraction-selection-attrition.

Key to working in an organization is having your personality fit the organizations.

  1. Fit-employee
    • Personality
      • Innovative: Open Minded (but not highly conscientious)
      • Detail Oriented: Highly Conscientious
      • Aggressive: Extraverts but not open, attracts disagreeable people
      • Outcome-oriented: Conscientious
      • Supportive: Agreeable
      • Reward Oriented: Disagreeable
      • Decisive: Disagreeable
      • Team Oriented: Extraverts and discourage conscientious people
    • Value
    • Work Style
  2. Fit-organization
    • Culture
      • There are six (eight?) cultures
        1. Innovative
        1. Detailed
        1. Agressive
        1. Outcome oriented
        1. Supportive
        1. Reward Oriented
        1. Decisive
        1. Team oriented
    • Workgroup
    • Job
  3. Applications.
  4. Recruitment
    • Recruiters can identify whether or not you will fit
    • If you are likeable, they will be biased towards you
    • If you have excellent credentials, they will be biased towards you
    • If you are attractive, they will be biased towards you
  5. Attrition.
  6. Effects: Similarity

Strategy for getting a job:

  • Opinion Conformity does not work.
  • Complimentary does not work.
  • Credentials does work.
  • Likeability (Smiling) does not work.
  • Fit is more effective than any other strategy.

Problem

  • People lie
    • Slight image creation (enhancing fit)
    • Extensive image creation (build stories by arranging work experiences, invent things in your background)
    • Image protection (omitting bad things from your background or masking them)
    • Engratiation (make the interviewer feel better)
    • Done by high self-monitors and high-machavellians.
    • Extensive image creation works really well.
    • Image protection hurts your chances.
    • Asking follow-up questions of the applicant enhances the abilities of the liars.

Overall Research

  • Job fit reduces stress
  • Job fit increases job satisfaction
  • Low job fit doesn't predict quitting
  • Hiring practices reinforce inertia

Life cycle perspectives

Organizations go through stages of life.

Downs

  1. Growth accelerator effect.
    • Stimulus event
    • Infusion of capital
    • Expanding tasks
    • Creates an age lump: a time where you hire a bunch of people who are all similar reducing amount of upward mobility
  2. Decelerator effect.
    • Competition for resources
    • Decrease in talent
      • As you hire more people, you hire bodies instead of talent
      • Stay small.
    • Hard to replicate initial success.
  3. Result
    • Death
      • Blinding: Not paying attention to signs that things aren't going well
      • Inaction: Not acting on signs that things are going wrong
      • Faulty Action: Making things worse
      • Crisis: Blood in the hallways
      • Death
    • Reinvention
      • Find a new cause
    • Mergers and acquistions
      • Bad on employees
      • Culture clash

Gersick

  1. Equilibrium change.
    • Maintaining/carrying out functions
    • Superficial adjustment
    • This works because it focuses on small changes
    • Forces to resist bigger change.
      • Cognition: know one way to look at things.
      • Motivation: fear of change.
      • Obligations to stakeholders
      • Benefits.
  2. Revolutionary change.
    • Change in the deep structure of an organization. Culture.
    • Rarely occurs.
    • Causes
      • Internal changes
      • External changes.
      • Usually due to Crises/failure/time pressure.
    • Patterns of revolutionary change.
      • Slow rather than fast.
      • Nonlinear rather than linear.
      • Failure with success.
      • Central areas first then branch out
        • This leads to success
        • Jail theory

Geiner, Life phases of an organization.

Phase 1

  • Evolution: Growth through creativity.
    • Disorganized and fun.
  • Revolution: Crisis of leadership
    • No one knows how to run a company. Someone must take charge.

Phase 2

  • Evolution: Growth through direction.
    • Someone starts leading.
  • Revolution: Crisis of autonomy.
    • Pushback from leadership. Coup to throw out the leader.

Phase 3

  • Evolution: Growth through delegation.
    • Start delegating tasks and decisions.
    • People do whatever they want
  • Revolution: Crisis of control.
    • Reaction to inefficiency and chaos.

Phase 4

  • Evolution: Growth through coordination.
    • Control by committees: BUREAUCRACY
  • Revolution: Crisis of red tape.
    • Goodness, everything takes forever.

Phase 5

  • Evolution: Growth through collaboration.
  • Revolution: Crisis of ????

Basically the ebb and flow of chaos and order.

Teleology Approach

Organizations can do something to create control.

Dissatisfaction—Search/interact—Set-envision goals—Implement goals.

Downs - Performance gaps.

  • Constant comparison of performance goals.
  • Disincentive for meeting goals

Causes

  • Inevitable internal turnover.
  • Internal technological change.
  • Repercussions of own performance.
  • External factors.

How organizations react.

  • Do nothing.
    • Often the scenario when knowledge is only internal
  • Conform to view of stakeholders
  • Deny there is a gap. Lie.
  • Convince others to change expectations.
  • Change stakeholders.

Biases for solutions

  • Screen out alternatives that hurt self.
  • Give more weight to alternatives that benefit self.
  • Won’t totally comply with all changes.
  • Distort information to look good.
  • Biases stronger in some people than others.

Types of managers.

  • Self-interested.
    • Climbers: maximize own power, income and prestige.
      • Press for early promotion
      • First tactic is aggrandizing
      • Next tactic to jump ship
      • Change oriented people
      • increases decelleration effect
    • Conservers: maintain own power, income and presige.
      • Often climbers who rose to the level where they can't climb any more
      • Middle Management
      • Often Middle Aged
      • Often part of an age lump
      • As time goes on, you will eventually become a conserver.
  • Mixed motive. Care about self and organization.
    • Advocates: care about department.
      • Advocates for anything in their unit
      • Make good unit heads
      • Even-handed internally
      • Aggressive in resources aquistion
    • Statesmen: care about organization.
      • Identify with the organization over the department
      • Will sacrifice resources of department for good of the organization
      • Big picture view
    • Zealots: care about policy
      • Does not identify with organization or department
      • Identifies with a CAUSE.
      • Pushes cause relentlessly.
      • Filled with energy.
      • Extremely obnoxious.

Search problems.

If you have to create change, you have engage in a search.

  • time pressure
    • Consider minimal alternatives
    • Biases become greater.
    • Restrict participants.
    • Kills Change
  • Costs
    • time spent searching is time not changing