Tuesday, May 05, 2009

ORganization culture Change ...A Nightmare???

Organizational culture is the identity and personality of the organization which makes the uniqueness. This personality is glued with collection of values and norms that are shared by people and groups in an organization and that control the way they interact with each other and with people outside the organization and comprised of the shared assumptions, values, shared priorities and norms, tangible artifacts of organization and behavioral patterns of organizational members. Once the members are incepted, they soon come to sense the particular culture of an organization and become part and parcel of it. Relationship diagram of cultural entities are very complex and very difficulty explain and distinguish, because they are interconnected, randomly changing and very volatile.

Due to this nature, today organizations attention towards the culture management has dramatically increased, because it is the engine of the organization which drives it towards achieving organizational goals and objectives. So the interested parties of the organization always try to keep the engine running while executing minimum or no changes. This concept of minimum changes concept implies that culture change is difficult and it should be carefully advocated.

Normally people are attached and frozen with current comfortable culture. They resist changing the situation and show strong reactions. Following are some of the key issues found.
1. Comfort with current situation. When people work in a culture for a long time a social environment is built around them and they are trapped within it.
2. Fear of collapse. Not all the organizational changes are going to be successful. There are thousands of user stories of failure.
3. Unpredictability of new system.
4. Unwillingness to learn and experience new things. Different types of personalities can be found in an organization. Some are self motivated and willing to experience new things. But most of the people do not want to do so.
5. Difficulty in defining the complete change model. It is evident that modeling a change for all the organizational requirements is hard and even harder to define a flexible model which caters for changing requirements.
6. Feeling of the participants that their autonomy and their security are threatened.

Careful handling of these situations while building safety nets and preventing frustration from developing into resistance helped to a successful culture change.

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