HOW WELL
TEAMS INITIATE AND ADAPT TO ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE
Throughout the last decades of the 20th century many
organizations repeated the mantra, ‘people are our greatest assets’, and many
would then apologize profusely when they were forced into downsizing or
‘rightsizing’ the workforce. Similarly many organizations have sung the praises
of teams and how essential they are within the modern organization. Many
organizations have sets of competences or stated values that implicitly and
explicitly pronounce that their employees need to work in the spirit of team
work and partnership.
It was therefore interesting for the authors to discover that
there was a real lack of any authoritative research on the interplay between
organizational change and team working. We have seen in a previous chapter the
effect that change has on individuals and groups of individuals; but what has
not been studied is the effect of change on teams. And as a consequence there is
very little research on strategies for managing and leading teams through
organizational change.
Whelan-Berry and Gordon (2000), in their research into effective
organizational change, conducted a multi-level analysis of the organizational
change process. To quote them:
they found no change process models at the group or team
level of analysis in the organization studies and change literature. Literature
exists which explores different aspects of team or group development, team or
group effectiveness, implementation of specific interventions, and
organizational and individual aspects of the change, but not a group/team change
process model … the lack of change process models for
the team or group level change process in the context of organizational change
leaves a major portion of the organizational change process
unclear.
They continue:
The primary focus of existing organizational change models
is what to do as opposed to explaining or predicting the change process. Most of
the models implicitly, and a few explicitly, acknowledge, the inherent (sub)
processes of group level and individual level change, but do not include the
details of these processes in the model. The question is how does the change
process vary when considered across levels of analysis? For example, how does a
vision get ‘translated,’ that is, take on meaning, in each location or department? In addition, what happens at the
point of implementation? We must ‘double click’ at the point of implementation
in the organizational level change process; that is, we must look at the group
and individual levels and their respective change processes to understand the
translation and implementation of the organizational level change vision and
desired change outcomes to group and subsequently to individual meanings,
frameworks, and behaviours.
Table 2.6 examines
each type of team previously identified, and looks at the way in which this type
of team can impact or react to organizational change. We also look at the pros
and cons of each team type when involved in an organizational change
process.
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