Management Styles and Roles

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Change Management MGMT625

LESSON # 27

Management Styles and Roles

Education and communication involve the reasons for and means of strategic change. Educating and

communicating about strategic change might be very time consuming activity, and direction might not

be clear to managers especially in large organizations. Change may be ineffective owing to

misinformation and ineffective communication. For strategic change to take place reliance on top

down communication processes may be problematic.

Collaboration or Participation in the change process is the involvement of those who will be affected

by strategic change in the identification of strategic issues, the strategic agenda, the strategic decision

making processes or the planning of strategic change. This can help in increasing ownership and

commitment to change and change process. It may entail the setting up of project teams or task forces.

Nonetheless, this may prove to be more time consuming process but would lead to enhance the quality

of decision. Strategy workshops can be quite useful for cross levels of management to work on

particular strategic problems, provide solution within a larger strategic framework and drive change

mechanisms down to routine aspects of organizational change

Intervention is the coordination of and authority over processes of change by a change agent who

delegates elements of the change process. Change agent retains control though interventions. For

example, at particular stages of change such as idea generation, data collection, detailed planning, the

development of rationale for change and the identification of critical success factors are delegated to

project teams. If such teams do not take full responsibilities of the change processes then change

sponsors tries to ensure the monitoring of change progress.

Direction involves the use of personal managerial authority to establish a clear future strategy and how

change will occur. It is essentially top down management of strategic change. It may be associated

with clear vision or strategic intent developed by someone seen as leader in the organization. There are

different styles of managing change. Two broad categories are directive and participative styles.

Different stages in the change process may require different styles of managing change. Directive style

is speedy and effective but runs the risk of overall acceptance while participation or intervention may

be helpful in gaining wider acceptance and commitment across the organization but at the same time

tends to be slower in its pace. If the organization corresponds to the kind of adhocracy, network or

learning organization, it is likely to employ collaboration or participation based styles. In the most

extreme for directive style becomes coercive, engaged in the imposition of change. This is a type of

forced learning entailing explicit use of power but may be necessary for the organization facing crisis

or concerned with large scale and rapid organizational transformation. Such type of transformation is

least successful without crisis or creating crisis.

Change Agent Roles

Change agent is an individual or group that affects strategic change in organization. In simple words

change agent is the creator of change or strategy. These may be senior executives or CEO, middle level

managers, and outsiders like consultants. Traditionally it is the external consultants, especially in the

Western economies who are hired for their specialized job and expertise to come and visit organization to

diagnose the ailment and give prescription for corrective measures in strategy or structure. Another type

of change agents are internal consultants or senior executives, and can be identified as strategic leaders

who are well verse with organization's problems and policies. The approach of such in-house strategic

leaders could be legal, bureaucratic, transactional or transformational. Nonetheless the common

prescription is that strategic change could take place meaningfully if the CEO or strategic leader is

visionary. Therefore we need a transformational or visionary leadership in order to have strategic change.

The question of course now will be what the attributes of such type of leadership are. From our own

cultural perspective one such prescriptions is given by our national poet as

Change Management MGMT625

The attributes of a leader as someone who is a visionary , true communicator a communication which

touches heart and full of empathy and commitment who stands committed and can have feelings of

others

Another perspective is MOUND model of change management which emphasizes greater role for the

middle level manager as change agent. Therefore, recall your memories for Z theory of management

which says policy making, implementation and organizational actions will be most effective at middle

levels of management instead of top down ( theory X) or bottom up (theory Y). This essentially is known

as "ringsei" in Japanese language which means consensus oriented decision making. The logic is that is

the middle level managers and their network who have greater levels of collegiality, communicability and

placed strategically between senior executives and lower level workers and supervisors to bridge the gap

and hence make organization effective in seeking its goals and objectives effectively. The MOUND

model is illustrated below:

T he Mound Model for Change

MIDDLE

OUT

DOWN

This means ay idea or strategy which is conceived by middle level of any one function area or department

quickly moves out at the same horizontal level to middle level managers in other function areas or

departments. The idea or strategy soon moves upward to senior executives and CEO, and once they get

convinced by newer suggestions make part of organization wide policies. Hence the new idea or strategy

then quickly moves downward. The MOUND model seems more appropriate for managing change in

large organizations and bureaucracies where distances between top level managers and implementation

levels are very high.

Recent concept of change agent might include lower level managers and workers, especially from

knowledge worker and knowledge management perspectives. The concept of knowledge worker is that all

members of the organizations are considered knowledge workers even those who are the shop-floor level,

have tacit knowledge and know their job best, and can contribute effectively for organization through a

conducive learning environment.

3. Levers for managing strategic Change

The followings are different levers that can be employed to manage strategic change:

Structure and Control Systems

Changing aspects of structure and control of organization are considered important aspects of strategic

change. But most of the time top managers may change strategy but behaviour and assumptions remain

the same, with the result that change programme tends to be ineffective. What is more important is that

whether the proposed strategic change brings in conformity of thinking values and system or promotes

and incorporates criticality? Generally when we talk of system we mean to stress uniformity, conformity

Change Management MGMT625

and stability but systemic thinking also tend to incorporate different views of reality and critical

thinking. Because system itself is composed of various subsystems having different demands and

functions. Therefore it is important for change agents and change leaders while designing structure and

control system that it should not just be considered for manufacturing consent instead should be directed

to promote knowledge and values appropriate for strategic change.

Routines

Routines are the organizationally "specific ways to do things around here" which tend to persist over

time and guide people's behaviour. Routines may also be considered as a double edge sword in the

sense that it may lead organization to carry its operations in distinct ways and achieve its competitive

edge, but also present a risk to act to block change and creativity, and may lead to strategic drift.

Changes in organizational routines can be a powerful signal of and stimulus for change because change

in strategy should correspond to change in implementation or operations. But then routines are closely

related with the existing paradigm, hence changing strategy means changes in taken for granted

assumptions and taken for granted routines and ways of doing things that are the cultural elements.

Routines are even considered more powerful than even education and communication technique of

changing people. Thus changing routine is a good technique to change behaviour which may help

people in evaluating and changing their beliefs and assumptions. Therefore it is suggested for managers

who are trying to effect strategic changes to take personal responsibility not only for identifying changes

in routines, but also for monitoring that they actually occur. The changes may appear to be mundane but

they can have significant impact.

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