making-sense-of-change-management

Organizational change• each individual should be managed by objectives;• teams represent no more than the summation of individual efforts;• management should control and there should be employee discipline.This leads to the following assumptions about organizational change:• The organization can be changed to an agreed end state by those inpositions of authority.• There will be resistance, and this needs to be managed.• Change can be executed well if it is well planned and well controlled.What are the limitations of this metaphor? The mechanistic view leadsmanagers to design and run the organization as if it were a machine. Thisapproach works well in stable situations, but when the need for a significantchange arises, this will be seen and experienced by employees as amajor overhaul which is usually highly disruptive and therefore encountersresistance. Change when approached with these assumptions istherefore hard work. It will necessitate strong management action, inspirationalvision, and control from the top down.See the works of Frederick Taylor and Henri Fayol if you wish toexamine further some of the original thinking behind this metaphor.Organizations as political systemsWhen we see organizations as political systems we aredrawing clear parallels between how organizationsare run and systems of political rule. We may refer to‘democracies’, ‘autocracy’ or even ‘anarchy’ todescribe what is going on in a particular organization.Here we are describing the style of power ruleemployed in that organization.The political metaphor is useful because it recognizesthe important role that power play, competing interestsand conflict have in organizational life. Gareth Morgancomments, ‘Many people hold the belief that business101