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

"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
     • 2. Detailed
     • 3. Agressive
     • 4. Outcome oriented
     • 5. Supportive
     • 6. Reward Oriented
     • 7. Decisive
     • 8. 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