Items Description of Module

Subject Name Management

Paper Name Organisational Change and Development
Module Title Recipients of Change
Module Id Module no.-12
Pre- Requisites Basic knowledge of organisation development
Objectives To study the components of recipients of change.
Keywords Change, level of change, recipients of change.
 QUADRANT-I

Module 12: Recipients of Change

1. Learning Objectives
2. Introduction

3. How do people react to change?

4. Why do negative reactions occur to change?

5. Changes in Organizations at Individual Level

6. Changes in Organizations at Group Level

7. Changes in Organizations at Larger- System Level

8. Summary

1. Learning objectives

After studying this module, the students shall be able to learn about the following:

 How do people respond to change?

 Why negative reactions occur to change?
 Changes in organizations at individual level
 Changes in organizations at group level
 Changes in organizations at larger–system level

2. Introduction

The models of organisation change and the analysis that is suggested are from the
perspectives of the manager who is making the change to happen. However, the reality of our
lives is that we’re probably more often on the receiving end- the recipients of change. This
module deals with understanding the reactions of recipients of change and the change agents’
incorporation to improve their change plans. It deals with the reality of those who find
themselves on the receiving end of change. It will consider the different reactions to change,
support for change, mixed feelings towards change and resistance to change. An organisation
is a totality comprising of interacting parts and components. To change a part of organisation
does not constitute organizational change. Organisational change is useful to analyze, to
examine the various parts and how they affect and are affected by each other and by the
whole. For understanding organizational change thoroughly, it is critical to consider the
multiple perspectives as the process is so complex. There are two types of changes,
evolutionary change and revolutionary change. Although there is overlap between the two,
separating them helps us to understand more clearly that organization change occurs quite
differently depending upon what to change like change for improving operations is to be
made or change in entirely new direction is to be made. In this module we would study the
three perspectives; individual level, group level and total system.

3. How do people react to change?

Many managers assume that resistance is inevitable in change situations. It is the time to
dismiss this myth. Resistance does not always react negatively and in many situations they
will react positively. Many questions will also be raised and they are thinking individuals,
they try to make sense out of change and its impact. This questioning is perceived as
resistance, but not necessarily the same. Often if the resistance arises, it does so when the
recipients resolve their mixed feelings. If they conclude that the benefits to them clearly
outweighs the costs and consequences, have high personal relevance and are consistent with
their attitudes and values, support is highly likely. It is also suggested that resistance to
change is a term that has lost its usefulness because it oversimplifies the matter and becomes
a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the change leaders assume that resistance will occur, it becomes
more likely. Change leaders should focus on trying to understand why people react to the
change as they do and how those reactions are likely to evolve over time.

When the changes are introduced, recipients often find themselves pulled in different
directions. Conflicting messages are often delivered by friends, relatives, co-workers,
subordinates and managers and are so influential in opinion formulation, if things become
polarized around the change, people who have come to a decision may view those who are of
different opinion with suspicion and disapproval. The mixed feelings that many feel can be
magnified by the concerns about the impact of the change on the relationship with others,
their ability to do what is asked of them, the fit with their needs and values, and their future
prospects. These concerns are enhanced by the lack of confidence that matters can be
resolved positively and produce the intended results. When the recipients see themselves as
relatively powerless, a variety of undesirable coping responses, including alienation,
passivity, sabotage and turnover may result. The perceptions of costs and benefits of change
depend on what people are concerned about, what they have experienced in the past and what
they think they know. Sometimes, small changes may produce strong responses in one group
due to perceived consequences, whereas much more significant changes will produce mild
reactions in another group due to perceptions that the impact on them will not be important.

4. Why do negative reactions occur to change?

Change leaders undertake an initiative because they believe the benefits will overweigh there
costs. However, the recipients of change, those on the receiving end may have a very
different perspective. They may fell imposed upon and unprepared or see themselves and
their co-workers as negatively affected by the changes. They may perceive risks to the
organizations, see problems with the initiative of change and may mistrust the change leader.

Following can be the causes of the negative reactions to change:

 Negative consequences overweigh the benefits.

 The communication process is faulty leading to confusion and doubt.
 There is concern that the change has been ill conceived and insufficiently tested or
may have adverse consequences that are not anticipated.
 The recipients lack experience with change and its implications or have habituated
approaches that they rely on and remain committed to.
 The recipients have had prior negative experience with a similar change.
 The negative reactions of peer, subordinates and supervisors also influence the views.
 The change process is seen to be lacking justice.

Concerns and negative reactions towards change for a variety of reasons. First, perception
concerning the negative consequences of the change may simply be true. The change may be
fundamentally incongruent with the things the recipients value about their jobs or the
workplace. The loss of work is likely the most extreme form of this. When significant job
losses are involved such as when the major employer in a city decides to close their plant, the
costs are all too real for the recipients. In such situations it is difficult for the recipients to see
positive consequences of the change. Second, the communication process can be flawed and
the recipients may be left feeling ill informed. Support is likely to be less when people feel
they lack the information they need to make an informed judgment. Third, the recipients may
have serious doubt about the impact and effectiveness of the change. They may be concerned
that the change initiatives has not been sufficiently studied and tested. Fourth, recipients may
react negatively because they lack experience with change and are unsure about its
implications. When the conditions in an organization are stable for a long period of time,
even modest changes can seem threatening. Fifth, recipients may have negative experience
with the change initiatives that seem similar to the one being advocated. If the recipients have
learnt that the change initiatives will lead to layoffs, then their reaction will be negative.
Sixth, they may have had negative experience with those advocating change, they may
mistrust the judgment of the change leaders and their ability to deliver the promises. Seventh,
recipients may be influenced by the negative reactions of peer, subordinates and managers
who they trust. The opinion leaders have significant impact. There may also be justice related
concerns. Recipients may see the process as lacking in the procedural justice.

In summary, the resistance is one of the responses to change initiative, is the resistance is
based on the different views of consequences; the reasons need to be understood and change
plans to be modified.

5. Changes in Organizations at Individual Level

Changes at the individual level are designed and implemented to facilitate to help the
organization to move in its new direction. This assumption is critical to our understanding.
Most changes at individual level in organizations are not in the service of moving the total
system in a new direction. For example training programs are conducted because another
competitor in the industry is doing so and to remain in competition. The three primary change
examples for individuals that can be in the service of helping to implement the organization
change are as follows:

 Recruitment, selection, replacement and displacement: This category of individual

change concerns getting, placing and keeping the right people in the right roles and
jobs to facilitate the larger change effort.
 Training and development: Training programs are designed and conducted to help
bring about organization change, most of time the effort is directed toward individuals
in managerial positions.
  Coaching and counseling: Counseling was recognized as a tool for individual
development and organizational development at least seventy years ago when the
Hawthrone studies were conducted. When counseling and coaching is used for
purposes of furthering organizational change, we have the problem of integrating
individual needs and organizational goals. Most of the time coaching is provided
informally with the internal organizational professionals. These informal encounters
may be carried out during lunch conversations, brief and spontaneous talks with the
managers. More recently the executive coaching has been incorporated. Coaching
occurs at all levels of the organization but executive coaching has more elegance.
Witherspoon and White(1998) have specified at least four roles that executives play:
i. Coaching for skills
ii. Coaching for performance
iii. Coaching for development
iv. Coaching for executive’s agenda

Individual responses to organization change

Individual’s reactions to significant change in organizations, change that directly affects them
has been linked to the psychiatrist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s (1969) description of the five
stages that most people for through when they are faced with a terminal illness. The struggle
begins with

a) shock and denial

b) moves to anger
c) To bargaining and to attempts to postpone the inevitable
d) To depression
e) To acceptance.

Not everyone moves through all these stages, some never moves beyond denial. Some
organizational members fight the change to death, constantly denying that the change is
necessary. Others embrace the changes readily and move with it. Most people are somewhere
in between and move through all the stages. There are three ways to help organizational
members to deal with change, conceptually, achieving closure and participation. Frequently,
giving people a way of thinking about what they are experiencing can be useful. The
framework developed by William Bridges is an example. He has three phases:
 a) Ending and letting go
b) Going through the neutral zone
c) Making a new beginning

He distinguished the change and transition. Change is something that starts and stops or when
something that used to happen in one way starts happening in another manner. Transition is a
psychological process extending over a long period of time and cannot be managed unlike
change.

6. Changes in Organizations at Group Level

The primary work group, whether it is a top management, packaging g unit at plant level, or a
district sales team, is the most important subsystem within an organization. The work group
serves as the context and locus for:

 The interface between individual and organisation

 Primary social relationships and support of individual employee, whether he or she is
a manager or not
 A determination of the employee’s sense of organizational reality.

The extent to which members of a group work well together and the extent to which they
work well with other groups in the organisation will determine the overall effectiveness of the
organisation. Work groups have always been important for the organizational effectiveness.
This importance is increasing. The single individual who knows many of the functions and
specialties within an organisation is becoming more and more a rarity. Groups of various
specialists attempting to produce something that is greater than the total of their individual
specializes are becoming more the rule than exception. Newer the organisation structures,
such as the matrix design and networks, requires an increase in group activities.

 Team building: Organization change efforts rely heavily on the use of work groups.
These family units within the organization have to make changes in the way they
conduct their work. Their unit goals may need to be entirely different; their roles
within the unit may need to be modified and so on. Conducting team building
activities is often an activity in support of the larger organisation change.
  Self-Directed groups: It may be that as part of a larger change effort, management
has decided to flatten the organization’s hierarchy, i.e. to eliminate the several layers
of supervision. Organisational members need to learn more about how to manage
themselves individually and in work units.
 Intergroup: Work units or groups in the organization that are normally dependent on
one another such as marketing people working with operations people, research and
development with manufacturing, and so on, will from time to time experience
problems and issues with one another. Each group has its own mission but for that
mission to be accomplished, each group occasionally depends on the other. Their
mutual dependence is a natural setting of conflict.

Group responses to Organization change

The more that work units in the organization are involves in helping to plan and implement
change, the more they are likely to embrace rather than resist the organization change effort.
Resistance by organizational groups can take the following forms:

 Protection and competition, to change our unit is to endanger a central and core
competence of the organization is an expression often heard during times of
organisation change. The work group is fighting with survival and will muster the
every rationale, fact and guilt in inducing behavior to justify the continuation.
 Changing allegiances and ownership, to avoid dealing with organisation change,
group may opt for becoming a separate entity formally departing from parent
organization.
 The demand for new leadership, distinction between the really and fake conflict, there
are times and circumstances in which the group’s leader is simply not capable of
dealing with and leading the change effort. Under these conditions the leader should
be replaced.

Finally, it make sense to recompose the group, not changing its function necessarily and it
may be that new skills and technology are needed for a particular work unit to forward in
support of the larger change effort.
 7. Changes in Organizations at Larger-System Level

An organization change effort begins all at once with the total system, especially in a large
organization. Beginnings typically involve an individual, group, program, such as
management training or an already recognized need to make a significant change in the
organization structure. In this, we consider the interventions previously described. In
examining the large system change, we consider the orders of change, phases of large system
change, change focus and finally change at the inter-organizational level.

 Order of change: It is useful to thinks strategically about the different orders of

change as the change at the larger system is complex. Kimberly and Neilson have
suggested three orders of change. At first order of change, the initial focus is some
subsystem of the organization. The change would occur as a result of the intervention
in a particular unit or division within the organization. First order change is within a
subsystem and although change in that unit will have some consequences for the
larger system, the change within the initial sub system will be short lived. At Second
order change the target is a subsystem that is beyond the initial focus but that will be
affected if the initial effort is successful. The focus is frequently a category or set of
subsystems in the organization. An intervention may take place at the first line
supervisor, with one group of employees. At third order change influences is on
some organizational process or outcomes that are affected by multiple factors.
Wherever the interventions are made, the ultimate objective is larger to increase
productivity.
 Change phases: Lewin in his three phase model of change has explained the change
at group level. He gave three phases as unfreeze, movement and refreeze. In first
phase, unfreeze the system; this unfreezing may take variety of forms like creating a
sense of urgency to need of change. The second phase is movement or changing the
organization in new directions with different technologies and ways of operation. The
third phase is refreeze is initiated when the change is underway.
 Change focus: In this the question arises are where do we start change, what comes
next and then where do we focus. The answer depends on what is initiating the change
is from the organization’s external environment. The focus should be on the purpose,
mission and related matters. We also focus on the issues of leadership and
 organizational culture. The focus should be on all the matters such as organization
design, structure and information system.
 Change process: In general, process here refers to the mechanism that facilitate the
overall change effort,, such as communication systems and training programs that
focus o the new skills and behaviors needed to make the change work. More
significantly process refers to certain interventions meant to significantly implement
the change effort. Large group intervention and survey feedback should be done in the
change process.
 Inter-organizational: There are number of reasons for this. The opportunity to share
resources that neither organization by itself has and the opportunity to improve cost-
effectiveness by reducing redundancies. This is particular in case of mergers in which
two organizations of relatively equal size and scope come together as well.

System responses to Organisation Change

With strong efforts at planned process to bring about large-scale organization change,
including heavy use of involvement and participatory activities as well as clarity of direction
with strong leadership, successful changes can occur.

8. Summary

The models of organisation change and the analysis that is suggested are from the
perspectives of the manager who is making the change to happen. However, the reality of our
lives is that we’re probably more often on the receiving end- the recipients of change. This
module deals with understanding the reactions of recipients of change and the change agents’
incorporation to improve their change plans. It deals with the reality of those who find
themselves on the receiving end of change. It will consider the different reactions to change,
support for change, mixed feelings towards change and resistance to change. An organisation
is a totality comprising of interacting parts and components. To change a part of organisation
does not constitute organizational change. Organisational change is useful to analyze, to
examine the various parts and how they affect and are affected by each other and by the
whole. For understanding organizational change thoroughly, it is critical to consider the
multiple perspectives as the process is so complex. Many managers assume that resistance is
inevitable in change situations. It is the time to dismiss this myth. Resistance does not always
react negatively and in many situations they will react positively. Many questions will also be
raised and they are thinking individuals, they try to make sense out of change and its impact.
This questioning is perceived as resistance, but not necessarily the same. Often if the
resistance arises, it does so when the recipients resolve their mixed feelings. If they conclude
that the benefits to them clearly outweighs the costs and consequences, have high personal
relevance and are consistent with their attitudes and values, support is highly likely. It is also
suggested that resistance to change is a term that has lost its usefulness because it
oversimplifies the matter and becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Changes at the individual level are designed and implemented to facilitate to help the
organization to move in its new direction. This assumption is critical to our understanding.
Most changes at individual level in organizations are not in the service of moving the total
system in a new direction. For example training programs are conducted because another
competitor in the industry is doing so and to remain in competition. The primary work group,
whether it is a top management, packaging g unit at plant level, or a district sales team, is the
most important subsystem within an organization. The work group serves as the context and
locus for the interface between individual and organisation, primary social relationships and
support of individual employee, whether he or she is a manager or not a determination of the
employee’s sense of organizational reality. An organization change effort begins all at once
with the total system, especially in a large organization. Beginnings typically involve an
individual, group, program, such as management training or an already recognized need to
make a significant change in the organization structure. In this, we consider the interventions
previously described. In examining the large system change, we consider the orders of
change, phases of large system change, change focus and finally change at the inter-
organizational level. We have considered organization change from perspective of levels
individual (including interpersonal), group (including intergroup) and larger system
(including inter organizational).