Question

How does organizational culture impact the change process?

Reflect on your experience dealing with change. Explain whether you are naturally open to change or whether you resist change.

Based on your experience with change, explain how management helped or hindered the change process.

Answer 1

Organizational behavior is an essential part of forming a holistic understanding of the innate difference between individual characteristics and how it all comes to play when we interact with our external environment. In a simpler sense, we can say that organizational behavior dictates why individuals behave the way they do and how to recognize the factors that can be attributed to being the cause, or we can remedy a situation, by making use of our understanding of individual behavior characteristics.
Organizational behavior is the representation of how well the culture is understood and observed by the people, this is why culture has a lot to do with how individuals deal with change. Personally, I naturally accept a change that the management is trying to introduce, especially when it concerns the introduction of new technology or a structural change that is aimed at making work more efficient. However, I do believe that this is not the general consensus and I have observed a higher degree of variability within the behavior exhibited by my own workgroup. Most of my peers tend to reject the change at the initial stages and then when it becomes evident that the change is here to stay, they slowly confirm the prevalent values, without putting in that necessary effort to create an appreciation for the change. From the management’s perspective, on the surface, it looks like individuals have accepted the change, however, there is a large variability between acceptance and appreciation in this case. Now only do individuals create an execution where the system becomes inefficient, but also create a lack of coordination with the leadership in the later stages of the organizational processes. This can also be attributed to the management’s lack of communication and a lack of functional feedback system, where the individuals do not necessarily feel like it is in their best interest to raise their concerns, even when they do not show acceptance of the change, they conform and in my experience, the management accepts this as change acceptance most of the times the workforce is involved in a change process. The management has therefore hindered the process of change by not considering the impact of change and its acceptance within the individual groups, and just letting the various teams, supervisors, and the leaders deal with the challenges in the later stages.

** Leaving a thumbs-up would really help me out. Let me know if you face any problems.