Firman Bachtiar
In
civilized societies, people constantly and unconsciously comply with the values
and beliefs of a common culture and it
is this compliance that maintains the society. We don’t need to be told not to steal from
our friend or hurt our neighbor; we just know that it is wrong. And, if somebody
were to try and make us do either, naturally we would refuse. People tend to
keep a condition if they feel secure and convenient, it does not matter whether
it is against the law or broken the rule of game. It is a basic character of
primitive human being who lived in stone-age, in uncivilized society. They have
misperception about freedom, democracy or reformation. They sometimes move far
away from the truth, far away from the philosophy of modern, law
obedience-civilized-democratic, society, where freedom means limitation.
Change
requires efforts; change requires a learning process, both for the leader and
the follower, and change have risks. If the people think that the condition
already suitable for them to live in, it is quite obvious that people reluctant
to do anything that change the ‘comfortable’ situation, even the changes might
be end up with a better condition; it still have risks on it.
We always
like a ‘winning’ situation, and if there is change, we are afraid being lost,
we are not used in a ‘loosing’ position, we are not ready for lost, we are not
a good looser. This is the basic reason, why the change is so difficult,
because we are afraid to give something; we are covetous of fame, property, and
position.
Keynes
said that the greatest difficulty lies
not in persuading people to accept new ideas, but in persuading them to abandon
old ones.
Organizations
similarly develop cultures made up of values and beliefs about how people
should behave. Employees associate these values and beliefs with the
organization’s success and don’t need to be told, what to do or what not to do
to comply with the culture. As long as the culture is remains relevant the
organization benefits – managers are relieved of much of the work associated
with controlling or directing staff. However, if the environment in which the
organization is operating changes the culture can become dysfunctional.
Employees
in a dysfunctional culture will then persist in applying old (and irrelevant)
strategies to new problems denying their obsolescence and blaming external
causes and individuals for their failure, rather than violate the culture. Left
unchecked, this behavior can continue until the culture causes the organization
to die rather than adapt.
Cultural
change therefore will not occur as a result of an educative, counseling
approach. Rather, it involves the
creation of a new system of values and beliefs that allow the organization to
perform.
Many
organizations are re-designed or restructured, on the assumption that this is
all that is needed to achieve major change.
If the organization has a dysfunctional culture, and the culture is left
unchecked a phenomenon known as ‘spring-back’ occurs – that is, that people
simply continue to act as they had under the old structure, regardless of their
new titles and reporting lines.
However,
once a culture is successfully changed, the new volunteer mindset it creates
relieves management of a piecemeal struggle to reform possibly hundreds of
management and/or work practices. According to Feldman,
K. (2006), this represents an enormous saving of valuable resources,
i.e.:
a. Transformational Leadership
A Transformational leader
brings about cultural change by ‘leading the organization toward a new, broader
view of the world’. What distinguishes
these ‘Transformational’ leaders from others is their use of symbolic
management to relieve the anxiety that makes employees clung to the irrelevant
strategies of the culture. His/her role
in doing so is more akin to that of an evangelist than it is to an
educator. The key to their success is
their passionate commitment to a new vision of the organization’s future and
their ability to share that vision with all employees. While we cannot all
become transformational leaders overnight, these leaders have been studied
closely so the good news are, that managers can now learn and practice the
skills that have enabled them to bring about change.
b. The Cultural
Change Process
Before
the change process can occur, there must be a 'felt need for change" by
key leaders in the organization to stir the organization out of
complacency. Where the culture is
heavily entrenched, destabilization may be needed to shake employees out of
their complacency and ‘feel’ the need for change. This destabilization also
however generates resistance to change. The transformational leader overcomes
this resistance largely by the process described below:
Initially
they identify and develop the organization's distinctive competencies and
channel resources to where they can be most effective. This identification of competencies also
allows the organization to focus on its new markets and the organizational
changes required to serve those markets. The organization is often redesigned
(or restructured) during this stage.
As the change progresses the leader
mobilizes commitment to the change by assisting staff through the painful
process of letting go of the old and adopting the new. He/she does this by:
·
Involving them in the
development of change strategies,
·
Demonstrating how the new
vision will meet their individual needs (e.g. for job security, professional
development),
·
Modeling the new behaviors
he/she needs them to adopt, and,
·
Using early successes in
some parts of the organization to reinforce further change.
Symbolic
gestures such as public statements about the change, awards or parties to
celebrate or launch a new strategy can also be helpful at this stage.
Finally
the change is institutionalized by building it in to the management processes,
structure and reward systems of the organization.
c. Line Managers and Cultural
Change
Although
the most publicized cases of cultural change attribute much to the leadership
shown by the organization’s Chief Executive, line managers also play a very
significant role in leading change.
There
is now strong research supporting the fact that employees learn more from their
direct manager than they do senior managers or executives. People have often
noted that very different cultures can exist across Business Units within a
larger organization. On investigation, people have invariably found that this
difference is due to the values and attitudes of the Unit Manager. In my
experience, a line manager always influences the culture of his/her unit.
Employees will copy his or her behavior whether that behavior is functional or
dysfunctional.
It
also found that despite the common claim that cultural change is not possible
unless the CEO exhibits all the traits of a transformational leader, this is
plainly not the case. The Vision Statement in most organizations that It dealt
with has not come from the CEO alone but from a team of managers who are at
least as equally committed to its realization. True, a charismatic CEO walking
the talk does make it easier, but as long as the CEO is not acting
inconsistently with the vision, much of the leadership role can be taken over
by managers in the organization.
Line
managers should note that all of the behaviors of Transformational Leaders
listed above could be implemented just as well within a business unit as across
the whole organization.
