IMPLEMENTATION: RADICAL OR TRANSFORMATIVE CHANGE

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Change Management MGMT625

Lesson 38

IMPLEMENTATION: RADICAL OR TRANSFORMATIVE CHANGE

Since the need for change often is unpredictable, it tends to be reactive, discontinuous, ad hoc and often

triggered by a situation of organizational crisis. Although the successful management of change is

accepted as a necessity in order to survive and succeed in today's highly competitive and continuously

evolving environment. Balogun and Hope Hailey (2004) report a failure rate of around 70 per cent of

all change programmes initiated. It may be suggested that this poor success rate indicates a fundamental

lack of a valid framework of how to implement and manage organizational change as what is currently

available to academics and practitioners is a wide range of contradictory and confusing theories and

approaches.

Grundy defines discontinuous change as `change which is marked by rapid shifts in strategy, structure

or culture, or in all three'. This sort of rapid change can be triggered by major internal problems or by

considerable external shock. According to Luecke (2003) discontinuous change is onetime events that

take place through large, widely separated initiatives, which are followed up by long periods of

consolidation and stillness and describes it as `single, abrupt shift from the past'.

Advocates of discontinues change argue this approach to be cost-effective as it does not promote a

ever-ending process of costly change initiatives, and that it creates less turmoil caused by continuous

change. Nelson (2003: 18) states that `Change cannot be relied upon to occur at a steady state, rather

there are periods of incremental change sandwiched between more violent periods of change which

have contributed to the illusion of stability once assumed to be the case.'

According to Luecke (2003) this (continuous) approach allows defensive behaviour, complacency,

inward focus, and routines, which again creates situations where major reform is frequently required.

What is suggested as a better approach to change is a situation where organizations and their people

continually monitor, sense and respond to the external and internal environment in small steps as an

ongoing process. Therefore, in sharp contrast to discontinuous change, Burnes (2004) identifies

continuous change as the ability to change continuously in a fundamental manner to keep up with the

fast-moving pace of change. Burnes (2004) refers to incremental change as when individual parts of an

organization deal increasingly and separately with one problem and one objective at a time. Advocates

of this view argue that change is best implemented through successive, limited, and negotiated shifts.

The difference between Burnes' (2004) understanding of continuous and incremental change is that the

former describes departmental, operational, ongoing changes, while the latter is concerned with

organization-wide strategies and the ability to constantly adapt these to the demands of both the

external and internal environment

When characterized by how change comes about, there are several different approaches. However, the

literature is dominated by planned and emergent change. Even though there is not one widely accepted,

clear and practical approach to organizational change management that explains what changes

organizations need to make and how to implement them the planned approach to organizational change

attempts to explain the process that bring about change. Furthermore, the planned approach emphasizes

the importance of understanding the different states which an organization will have to go through in

order to move from an unsatisfactory state to an identified desired state.

The foremost questions are how do we define and identify radical changes? What are radical or

transformational changes? Why it is considered more effective for organizational transformation?

Changes associated with strategy or strategic changes are considered revolutionary changes. For e.g.

restructuring, privatisation of a state owned unit, merger, take-over, acquisition or joint-venture

amongst two organizations. Similarly changes pertaining to product development or market

development and the strategies how to engage customers through differentiation, technology or cost

leadership. Such decisions of organizations like exit or entry decision viz. product, market, R& D etc.

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Change Management MGMT625

Other types of radical changes could be of down-sizing, cost-cutting but these are related to structural

changes as well.

Why Radical Change?

Arguments for radical changes are based on the inherent weakness associate with the incremental

approach to strategy implementation. By this we enter a debate between effectiveness and efficacy of

continuous (incremental) and discontinuous (radical) change? Which one is more effective? Rational

adaptation theorist believes organisation change can easily and speedily be managed given the various

types of exogenous changes. Natural selection theorist view organisation as complex systems severely

constrained by exogenous forces that create and institutionalise strong web of commitments. From this

perspective, organisations are inherently inflexible to respond to external opportunities and threat, and

rarely engage in transformations.

Orlikowski challenged the concept that changes must be planned, technology is the primary cause of

technology-based organisational transformation, and that radical changes always occur rapidly and

discontinuously. Therefore change cannot be anticipated and hence is discontinuous in nature. In

contrast she maintains that organisational transformation is an on-going improvisation enacted by

organisational actors trying to make sense of and act coherently with the world.

Radical or Transformative changes

Related concepts are quantum change, discontinuous change or radical change. Quantum change is said

to occur when change is both dramatic and concerted. A caution must be taken on strategic change as

this is defined as a variation in organization's long term goals and mission, and may occur in either

incremental or revolutionary manner. Therefore, increment view holds that organization experiences

large scale strategic changes quite slowly while revolutionary view suggests long periods of

organization experience brings very little strategic variation instead punctuated by short intense

periods of change.

Proponents of radical perspectives, organization changes very little through incremental change.

Incrementalism fails to account for large-scale organizational transitions which are related with total

structures, management processes and corporate cultures where the theme is of:

�

Restructuring

�

Repositioning

�

Revitalization

�

Or Renewal

Assumptions on which incrementalism rests are:

1. Senior managers have the capacity to fully anticipate the environmental forces (opportunity &

threat) and future conditions for further development. The assumption may be valid for stable

times and age of continuity. However an age of discontinuity presents an environment so

complex and turbulent that it is sometime impossible for the most competent manager to

accurately predict the future.

2. Second, assumption is that organization is run by intelligent and pro-active managers. In fact

organization and societal selection processes are such that many/ majority of managers are very

mediocre and have information and experience limited to their industry and cannot judge

complex information outside their industry and organization therefore cannot scan the

environment effectively. (where scanning environment is the 1st step in strategy formulation)

3. Third assumption is that large scale organizational change can always be accomplished

incrementally. The fact is managers have little control over economic fluctuation, political

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intervention, industry restructuring; and on other discontinuities and technological developments

which destroy the whole market and organization processes and structures (high pace of change

can not be managed incrementally). These discontinuities are often beyond the control of

managers because managers are members of a dominant coalition with a historical conditioned

model of reality.

Nonetheless the above stated arguments do not imply that managers are completely powerless in a

deterministic world. Johnson and Scholes view is more descriptive of reality as they believe that

managers live in a world operated by both determinate forces which act as constraints and also scope

for exercise of managerial choice. Here our concern is that discontinuities arise which are often beyond

the capacities of managers to sense and act upon, particularly given that managers are members of a

dominant coalition with an historically conditioned model of reality. To the extent that managers can be

powerless to change external forces that may also be unforeseen, and can be trapped in to a fixed mind-

set, they will be forced into an reactive rather than proactive mode. Their culture ordinarily is identified

as of a bureaucratic one which is based on tight and narrowly defined rules, procedures and following

precedence. Therefore in such a scenario managers and power elites in the organizations are least

motivated or internally driven for change. Hence in such cases the need is to have externally imposed

change. This is considered the only way to bring the organization back into fit with its environment.

Revolutionary change theorist view that organization having deep structures (Gersick 1991) or coherent

configuration of strategy, structure, systems, controls and ideologies which are highly stable in nature

limit the range of options available to manager contemplating change.

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