Fundamentals of Management Chapter 7

Fundamentals of Management - Chapter 7: Managing Innovation and Change

• Organizational change is any alteration of people, structure, or technology in an organization
• Change can be categorized as structural, technological, or related to people. Structural changes impact work specialization, departmentalization, chain of command, span of control, centralization, formalization and job redesign. Technological change includes alterations to work processes, and equipment. Changes to people affect attitudes, expectations, perceptions, and behaviors.
• External factors like the marketplace, government regulations, technology, labor markets, and economic shifts drive organizational change. Internal factors include changes in strategy, the workforce, and employee attitudes.
• A change agent is someone who acts as a catalyst and assumes responsibility for managing the process. Any manager can be a change agent. Change agents might also include internal staff specialists or external consultants.
• The Calm Waters Metaphor suggests change is planned and requires unfreezing the status quo, changing to a new state, and refreezing to make the change permanent. The three-step process involves unfreezing, changing, and refreezing.
• The White-Water Rapids Metaphor portrays change as constant and uninterrupted, like navigating a raging river.
• Organizational development (OD) is a technique or program used to change people or interpersonal work relationships. Popular OD efforts include survey feedback, process consultation, team-building, and intergroup development.
• Reasons why people resist change include uncertainty, habit, personal loss, and belief that change isn't in the organization's best interest. Resistance can be reduced by involving people in the change, offering training, and allowing for revisions.
• Techniques used to reduce change resistance include education and communication, participation, facilitation and support, negotiation, manipulation and co-option, and coercion.
• Action research, based on changing employee attitudes and behaviors, is a change process that involves diagnosing the need for change; introducing an intervention; and evaluating the changes. This involves gathering data, planning actions, taking steps, receiving feedback and redesigning systems.
• Appreciative inquiry focuses on organizations' strengths to create a vision of the future. It uses a four-step process (Discovery, Dreaming, Designing, Delivering) to identify strengths, envision possible futures, develop objectives for changes, and deliver the change.
• Managers make mistakes in leading change by being unaware of gaps between employee knowledge and what's actually happening, not creating awareness of the need for change, unrecognized internal conflict, lacking a vision to create desire for change, not adequately communicating the change or not empowering employees. Problems also arise in the refreezing stage for example stopping changes too soon, initiating new changes before previous ones are finished or not supporting the changes in the organization's culture.
• Effective communication during change includes CEO commitment, managerial action matching words, two-way communication, emphasizing face-to-face interactions, shared responsibility for communication, positive methods for communicating bad news, tailoring messages to audiences, and treating communication as a continuous process.
• Stress is anxiety over demands, constraints, or opportunities. Positive stress allows for peak performance at critical times. Job-related factors that cause stress include task demands, role demands (role conflicts, role overload, role ambiguity), interpersonal demands, organizational structure, and organizational leadership.
• Stress can be reduced through job-related controls like employee selection, job design, and working conditions. External support programs such as employee assistance programs (EAPs), and wellness programs can assist with personal stress factors. Techniques like matching skills to job needs, offering realistic job previews, improving communications, developing performance plans, and job redesign can all help.

Creativity and Innovation

• Creativity is the ability to produce novel and useful ideas. It's a four-step process involving perception, incubation, inspiration, and innovation.
• Innovation is the process of implementing a creative idea into a useful product or service.
• Innovative organizations often have cultures that accept ambiguity, tolerate the impractical, minimize external restrictions, tolerate risks and conflict, focus on ends, use an open system, and give positive feedback.
• Innovative organizations utilize human resource practices that promote training and development, offer job security, and encourage "idea champions".
• Design thinking offers a process for inventing new things. It stresses understanding deeply what customers need and turning insights into usable products.

This quiz explores the key concepts of managing innovation and change within organizations as detailed in Chapter 7. Topics include types of organizational change, influencing factors, and the role of change agents. Test your knowledge on how these elements interact to drive effective change.