Organizational change and stress management

1: Identify forces that act as stimulants to change and contrast planned and unplanned
change.
Six specific forces as stimulants for change:
 Nature of the workforce, technology
 Economic shocks
 Competition
 Social trends
 World politics
CHANGE: making things different.
PLANNED CHANGE: change activities that are intentional and goal oriented.
Goals of planned change: seeks to improve the ability of the organization to adapt to
changes in its environment; and seeks to change employee behavior.
CHANGE AGENT: persons who act as catalysts and assume the responsibility for
managing change activities.

2: List the sources for resistance to change.

Resistance can be overt, implicit, immediate, or deferred.
Sources:
 Individual:
Habit, security, economic factors, fear of the unknown, selective information processing
 Organizational:
Structural inertia, limited focus of change, group inertia, threat to expertise, threat to
established power relationships, threat to established resource allocations.
Overcoming Resistance to Change:
 Education and Communication
 Participation
 Building Support and Commitment
 Develop Positive Relationships
 Implementing Changes Fairly
 Manipulation and Cooptation
 Selecting People Who Accept Change
 Coercion

3: Compare the four main approaches to managing organizational change.

Levin’s three-step model:
 Unfreezing: changing to overcome the pressures of both individual resistance and group
conformity.
 Movement: a change process that transforms the organization from the status quo to a
desired end state.
 Refreezing: stabilizing a change intervention by balancing driving and restraining forces.
Lewin’s Three-Step Change Model
 Unfreezing the Status Quo

 DRIVING FORCES: forces that direct behavior away from the status quo.
 RESTRAINING FORCES: forces that hinder movement from the existing equilibrium.

Kotter’s Eight-Step Plan for Implementing Change

 Establish a sense of urgency by creating a compelling reason for why change is needed.
 Form a coalition with enough power to lead the change.
 Create a new vision to direct the change and strategies for achieving the vision.
 Communicate the vision throughout the organization.
 Empower others to act on the vision by removing barriers to change and encouraging risk
taking and creative problem solving.
 Plan for, create, and reward short-term “wins” that move the organization toward the new
vision.
 Consolidate improvements, reassess changes, and make necessary adjustments in the new
programs.
 Reinforce the changes by demonstrating the relationship between new behaviors and
organizational success.

 Action Research a change process based on systematic collection of data and then
selection of a change action based on what the analyzed data indicate.
Five steps:
 Diagnosis
 Analysis
 Feedback
 Action
 Evaluation
 Advantage: problem focused, and low change resistance.

 Organizational development (OD): a collection of planned change interventions, built

on humanistic-democratic values that seeks to improve organizational effectiveness and
employee well-being.
 The underlying values: respect for people, trust and support, power equalization,
confrontation, participation.
OD techniques:
 Sensitivity training: training groups that seek to change behavior through unstructured
group interaction.
  Survey feedback: the use of questionnaires to identify discrepancies among member
perceptions; discussion follows, and remedies are suggested.
 Process consultation (PC): a meeting in which a consultant assists a client in
understanding process events with which he or she must deal and identifying processes
that need improvement.
 Team building: high interaction among team members to increase trust and openness.
 Intergroup development: OD efforts to change the attitudes, stereotypes, and
perceptions that groups have of each other.
 Appreciative inquiry (AI): an approach that seeks to identify the unique qualities and
special strengths of an organization, which can be built on to improve performance.

4: Demonstrate two ways of creating a culture for change.

Stimulating a culture of innovation
 INNOVATION: a new idea applied to initiating or improving a product, process, or
service.
Sources:
Structural variables: organic structure, culture that encourages experimentation
 IDEA CHAMPIONS: individuals who take an innovation and actively and
enthusiastically promote the idea, build support, overcome resistance, and ensure that the
idea is implemented.
Creating a learning organization:
 LEARNING ORGANIZATION: an organization that has developed the continuous
capacity to adapt and change.
 SINGLE-LOOP LEARNING: a process of correcting errors using past routines and
present policies.
 DOUBLE-LOOP LEARNING: a process of correcting errors by modifying the
organization's objectives, policies, and standard routines.
 Managing learning:
 Establish a strategy
 Redesign the organization's structure
 Reshape the organization's culture

5: Define stress and identify its potential sources.

 STRESS: a dynamic condition in which an individual is confronted with an opportunity,
a demand, or a resource related to what the individual desires and for which the outcome
is perceived to be both uncertain and important.\
 CHALLENGE STRESSORS: stressors associated with work load, pressure to complete
tasks, and time urgency.
 HINDRANCE STRESSORS: stressors that keep you from reaching your goals (read
tape, office politics, confusion over job responsibilities).
 Stress is associated with demands and resources. Demands are responsibilities, pressures,
obligations, and even uncertainties that individuals face in the workplace. Resources are
things within an individual's control that can be used to resolve the demands.
Potential sources of stress:
 Environmental factors: economic uncertainty, political uncertainty, technological
change.
  Organizational factors: task demands, role demands, interpersonal demands.
 Personal factors: family problems, economic problems, personality.
A Model of Stress

6: Identify the consequences of stress.

Consequences of Stress
 Physiological Symptoms
 Psychological Symptoms
 Behavioral Symptoms

7: Contrast the individual and organizational approaches to managing stress.

Individual: implementing time-management techniques, increasing physical exercise,
relaxation training, and expanding the social support network.
Organizational: improved personnel selection and job placement, training, use of
realistic goal setting, redesigning of jobs, increased employee involvement, improved
organizational communication, offering employee sabbaticals, and establishment of
corporate wellness programs.
The Proposed Inverted-U Relationship between Stress and Job Performance