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462 PRACTICING ORGANIZATION DEVELOPMENT, 2ND EDITION
Toward the end of the eighteen-month period, the plant manager casually commented
how contented he was that the change process was now well-established.
He said that a year ago he had given a great deal of time and energy to the change
process—coming in early and leaving late. Now he considered that he didn’t have
to do that any more; in his view the change agenda was well-embedded and there
was no going back. Spontaneously, his team turned on him and retorted that now
they were coming in early and leaving late, putting a great deal of energy into the
change process, and were uncertain about the outcome. The plant manager’s
comments showed that he had switched from doing to sustaining, while his team
was at the doing stage. The front-line manager who found his role changing
was expressing denial through his incredulity about what he was now being asked
to do.
In viewing this case from the perspective of how change moved through that
organization, we can see that the change was initiated by the plant manager
(individual level). He initially brought assumptions of what needed to be done,
both attitudinal and behavioral, to achieve the desired productivity and survival
outcomes to his management team (team level). In time the members of the
management team understood what it was all about and took it to their respective
teams (interdepartmental group level). Within the production teams the
team process influenced the front-line supervisors to understand what was being
asked of them (individual level), which in turn reinforced the team processes
of these teams and the senior management team (team level). In this manner,
the change agenda, which involved a significant changing of assumptions,
moved through the hierarchy, from senior individual to management team to
middle manager to middle-level teams and so on. At the same time, in terms of
levels of complexity, the change process moved to and fro, from individual to
team, reinforced by team and back to individual, so that the progress of organizational
change was a complex iteration of individual and team learning and
change, with each being a cause and effect of the other.
CONCLUSIONS
In this chapter, I have taken the traditional construct of levels of analysis beyond
its usual application to focus on levels of aggregation as the systemic interdependence
and interrelationship of the individual, the team, the interdepartmental
group, and the organization. The Thoul plant case illustrates the important
role of interlevel dynamics in the process of learning and change. The interlevel
dynamics from individual to team and back, and from team to team and back,
brought out both the current mental models in individuals and the groups with
which they identified (front-line managers, senior managers, and so on) and
helped shape changes that were required in the thinking. Individual change took