ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE Organizational Culture and Leadership, 3rd Edition

328 ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE AND LEADERSHIPIf we want to learn things that really fit into our personality,then we must learn to scan our environment and develop our ownsolutions. For example, Amoco could have developed a trainingprogram for how to be a consultant, built around engineers who hadmade the shift successfully. However, senior management felt thatsuch a shift was so personal that they decided merely to create thestructure and the incentives but to let the individual engineers figureout for themselves how they wanted to manage the new kindsof relationships. In some cases this meant people leaving the organization.But those engineers who learned from their own experiencehow to be consultants genuinely evolved to a new kind ofcareer that they integrated into their total lives.The general principle here is that the leader as change managermust be clear about the ultimate goals—the new way of workingthat is to be achieved—but that does not necessarily imply thateveryone will get to that goal in the same way. Involvement of thelearner does not imply that the learner has a choice about the ultimategoals, but does imply that he or she has a choice of the meansto get there.RefreezingThe final step in any given change process is refreezing. This refersto the necessity for the new behavior and set of cognitions to bereinforced, to produce once-again confirming data. If such new conformationis not forthcoming, the search and coping process continues.As soon as confirming data from important environmentalsources, external stakeholders, or internal sources are produced, thenew beliefs and values gradually stabilize, become internalized, and,if they continue to work, become taken-for-granted assumptionsuntil new disconfirmations start the change process all over again.Identification and imitation will produce quicker learning thatwill be reinforced by the group and the leader who models the behavior,but this may only be as stable as the relationship with thatgroup or leader. If we want real internalization of the new cognitive