cameron and green making-sense-of-change-management

The underpinning theoryand politics should be kept apart… But the person advocating the case ofemployee rights or industrial democracy is not introducing a politicalissue so much as arguing for a different approach to a situation that isalready political.’The key beliefs are:• You can’t stay out of organizational politics: you’re already in it.• Building support for your approach is essential if you want to makeanything happen.• You need to know who is powerful, and who they are close to.• There is an important political map which overrides the publishedorganizational structure.• Coalitions between individuals are more important than work teams.• The most important decisions in an organization concern the allocationof scarce resources, that is, who gets what, and these are reachedthrough bargaining, negotiating and vying for position.This leads to the following assumptions about organizational change:• The change will not work unless it’s supported by a powerful person.• The wider the support for this change the better.• It is important to understand the political map, and to understandwho will be winners and losers as a result of this change.• Positive strategies include creating new coalitions and renegotiatingissues.What are the limitations of this metaphor? The disadvantage of using thismetaphor to the exclusion of others is that it can lead to the potentiallyunnecessary development of complex Machiavellian strategies, with anassumption that in any organizational endeavour, there are always winnersand losers. This can turn organizational life into a political war zone.See Pfeiffer’s book, Managing with Power: Politics and influence in organizations(1992) to explore this metaphor further.102