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Lesson#27
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Evaluating and Institutionalizing Organization Development Interventions-2
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Evaluating and Institutionalizing Organization Development
Interventions
Institutionalizing interventions:
Once it is determined that a change has been implemented and is
effective, attention is directed at
institutionalizing the changes—making them a permanent part of
the organization’s normal functioning.
Lewin described change as occurring in three stages: unfreezing,
moving, and refreezing. Institutionalizing
an OD intervention concerns refreezing. It involves the
long-term persistence of organizational changes: to
the extent that changes persist, they can be said to be
institutionalized. Such changes are not dependent on
any one person but exist as a part of the culture of an
organization.
This means that numerous others share
norms about the appropriateness of the changes.
How planned changes become institutionalized has not received
much attention in the OD literature.
Rapidly changing environments have led to admonitions from
consultants and practitioners to “change
constantly,” to “change before you have to,” and “if it’s not
broke, fix it anyway.” Such a context has
challenged the utility of the institutionalization concept. Why
endeavor to make any change permanent
given that it may require changing again soon? However, the
admonitions also have resulted in
institutionalization concepts being applied in new ways. Change
itself has become the focus of
institutionalization. Total quality management, organization
learning, integrated strategic change, and selfdesign
interventions all are aimed at enhancing the organization’s
capability for change. In this vein,
processes of institutionalization take on increased utility.
This section presents a framework identifying
factors and processes that contribute to the
institutionalization of OD interventions, including the process
of change itself.
Institutionalization Framework
:
Figure 37 presents a framework that identifies organization and
intervention characteristics and
institutionalization processes affecting the degree to which
change programs are institutionalized. The
model shows that two key antecedents—organization and
intervention characteristics—affect different
institutionalization processes operating in organizations. These
processes, in turn, affect various indicators
of institutionalization. The model also shows that organization
characteristics can influence intervention
characteristics. For example, organizations having powerful
unions may have trouble gaining internal
support for OD interventions.
Figure 37: Institutionalization Framework
Organization Characteristics
:
Figure 37 show that the following three key dimensions of an
organization can affect intervention
characteristics and institutionalization processes.
1. Congruence.
This is the degree to which an intervention is perceived as being in harmony
with the
organization’s managerial philosophy, strategy, and structure;
its current environment; and other changes
taking place. When an intervention is congruent with these
dimensions, the probability is improved that it
will be institutionalized. Congruence can facilitate persistence
by making it easier to gain member
commitment to the intervention and to diffuse it to wider
segments of the organization. The converse also
is true; many OD interventions promote employee participation
and growth. When applied in highly
bureaucratic organizations with formalized structures and
autocratic managerial styles, participative
interventions are not perceived as congruent with the
organization’s managerial philosophy.
2.
Stability of
environment and technology:
This
involves the degree to which the organization’s
environment and technology are changing. Unless the change
target is buffered from these changes or
unless the changes are dealt with directly by the change
program, it may be difficult to achieve long-term
intervention stability. For example, decreased demand for the
firm’s products or services can lead to
reductions in personnel that may change the composition of the
groups involved in the intervention.
Conversely, increased product demand can curtail
institutionalization by bringing new members on board
at a rate faster than they can be socialized effectively.
3.
Unionization
Diffusion of interventions may be more difficult in unionized settings,
especially if the
changes affect union contract issues, such as salary and fringe
benefits, ob design, and employee flexibility.
For example, a rigid union contract can make it difficult to
merge several job classifications into one, as
might be required to increase task variety in a job enrichment
program. It is important to emphasize,
however, that unions can be a powerful force for promoting
change, particularly when a good relationship
exists between union and management.
Goal
specificity
. This involves the extent
to which intervention goals are specific rather than broad.
Specificity of goals helps direct socializing activities (for
example. training and orienting new members) to
particular behaviors required to implement the intervention. It
also helps operationalize the new behaviors
so that rewards can be linked clearly to them. For example, an
intervention aimed only at increasing
product quality is likely to be more focused and readily put
into operation than a change program intended
to improve quality, quantity, safety, absenteeism, and employee
development.
2.
Programmability
.
This involves the degree to which the changes can be programmed or the extent to
which the different intervention characteristics can be
specified clearly in advance to enable socialization,
commitment, and reward allocation. For example, job enrichment
specifies three targets of change:
employee discretion, task variety, and feedback. The change
program can be planned and designed to
promote those specific features.
3.
Level of change
target
. This concerns the extent to
which the change target is the total organization,
rather than a department or small work group. Each level of
organization has facilitators and inhibitors of
persistence. Departmental and group changes are susceptible to
countervailing forces from others in the
organization. These can reduce the diffusion of the intervention
and lower its ability to impact organization
effectiveness. However, this does not preclude
institutionalizing the change within a department that
successfully insulates itself from the rest of the organization.
Such insulation often manifests itself as a
subculture within the organization.
Targeting the intervention to wider segments of the
organization, on the other hand, also can help or
hinder change persistence. A shared belief about the
intervention’s value can be a powerful incentive to
maintain the change, and promoting a consensus across
organizational departments exposed to the change
can facilitate institutionalization. But targeting the larger
system also can inhibit institutionalization. The
intervention can become mired in political resistance because of
the “not invented here” syndrome or
because powerful constituencies oppose it.
4.
Internal
support
. This refers to the degree to
which there is an internal support system to guide the
change process. Internal support, typically provided by an
internal consultant, can gain commitment for the
changes and help organization members implement them. External
consultants also can provide support,
especially on a temporary basis during the early stages of
implementation. For example, in many
interventions aimed at implementing high—involvement
organizations, both external and internal
consultants provide change support. The external consultant
typically brings expertise on organizational
design and trains members to implement the design. The internal
consultant generally helps members relate
to other organizational units, resolve conflicts and legitimize
the change activities within the organization.
5.
Sponsorship
.
This concerns the presence of a powerful sponsor who can initiate, allocate, and
legitimize resources for the intervention. Sponsors must come
from levels in the organization high enough
to control appropriate resources, and they must have the
visibility and power to nurture the intervention
and see that it remains viable. There are many examples of OD
interventions that persisted for several years
and then collapsed abruptly when the sponsor, usually a top
administrator, left the organization. There also
are numerous examples of middle managers withdrawing support for
interventions because top
management did not include them in the change program.
Institutionalization Processes:
The framework depicted in Figure 37 shows the following five
institutionalization processes that can
directly affect the degree to which OD interventions are
institutionalized.
1.
Socialization
.
This concerns the transmission of information about beliefs, preferences, norms,
and
values with respect to the intervention. Because implementation
of OD interventions generally involves
considerable learning and experimentation, a continual process
of socialization is necessary to promote
persistence of the change program. Organization members must
focus attention on the evolving nature of
the intervention and its ongoing meaning. They must communicate
this information to other employees,
especially new members. Transmission of information about the
intervention helps bring new members
onboard and allows participants to reaffirm the beliefs, norms,
and values underlying the intervention. For
example, employee involvement programs often include initial
transmission of information about the
intervention, as well as retraining of existing participants and
training of new members. Such processes are
intended to promote persistence of the program as both new
behaviors are learned and new members are
introduced.
2.
Commitment
.
This binds people to behaviors associated with the intervention. It includes
initial
commitment to the program, as well as recommitment over time.
Opportunities for commitment should
allow people to select the necessary behaviors freely,
explicitly, and publicly. These conditions favor high
commitment and can promote stability of the new behaviors.
Commitment should derive from several
organizational levels, including the employees directly involved
and the middle and upper managers who
can support or thwart the intervention. In many early employee
involvement programs, for example,
attention was directed at gaining workers’ commitment to such
programs. Unfortunately, middle managers
were often ignored and considerable management resistance to the
interventions resulted.
3.
Reward
allocation
. This involves linking
rewards to the new behaviors required by an intervention.
Organizational rewards can enhance the persistence of
interventions in at least two ways. First, a
combination of intrinsic and extrinsic rewards can reinforce new
behaviors. Intrinsic rewards are internal
and derive from the opportunities for challenge, development,
and accomplishment found in the work.
When interventions provide these opportunities, motivation to
perform should persist. This behavior can
be further reinforced by providing extrinsic rewards, such as
money, for increased contributions. Because
the value of extrinsic rewards tends to diminish over time, it
may be necessary to revise the reward system
to maintain high levels of desired behaviors.
Second, new behaviors will persist to the extent that rewards
are perceived as equitable by employees.
When new behaviors are fairly compensated. People are likely to
develop preferences for those behaviors.
Over time, those preferences should lead to normative and value
consensus about the appropriateness of
the intervention. For example, many employee involvement
programs fail to persist because employees feel
that their increased contributions to organizational
improvements are unfairly rewarded. This is especially
true for interventions relying exclusively on intrinsic rewards.
People argue that an intervention that
provides opportunities for intrinsic rewards also should provide
greater pay or extrinsic rewards for higher
levels of contribution to the organization.
4.
Diffusion
.
This refers to the process of transferring interventions from one system to
another. Diffusion
facilitates institutionalization by providing a wider
organizational base to support the new behaviors. Many
interventions fail to persist because they run counter to the
values and norms of the larger organization.
Rather than support the intervention, the larger organization
rejects the changes and often puts pressure on
the change target to revert to old behaviors. Diffusion of the
intervention to other organizational units
reduces this counter implementation force. It tends to lock in
behaviors by providing normative consensus
from other parts of the organization. Moreover, the act of
transmitting institutionalized behaviors to other
systems reinforces commitment to the changes.
5.
Sensing and
calibration
. This involves detecting
deviations from desired intervention behaviors and
taking corrective action, institutionalized behaviors invariably
encounter destabilizing forces, such as
changes in the environment, new technologies, and pressures from
other departments to nullify changes.
These factors cause some variation in performances preferences
norms, and values. To detect this variation
and take corrective actions, organizations must have some
sensing mechanism. Sensing mechanisms, such
as implementation feedback, provide information about the
occurrence of deviations. This knowledge can
then initiate corrective actions to ensure that behaviors are
more in line with the intervention. For example,
if a high level of job discretion associated with a job
enrichment intervention does not persist, information
about this problem might initiate’ corrective actions, such as
renewed attempts to socialize people or to
gain commitment to the intervention.
Indicators of Institutionalization:
Institutionalization is not an all-or-nothing concept but
reflects degrees of persistence of an intervention.
Figure 37 shows five indicators of the extent of an
intervention’s persistence. The extent to which the
following factors arc present or absent: indicates the degree of
Institutionalization
1.
Knowledge
.
This involves the extent to which organization members have knowledge of the
behaviors
associated with an intervention, it is concerned with whether
members know enough to perform the
behaviors and to recognize the consequences of that performance.
For example, job enrichment includes a
number of new behaviors, such as performing a greater variety of
tasks, analyzing information about task
performance, and making decisions about work methods and plans.
2.
Performance
.
This is concerned with the degree to which intervention behaviors are actually
performed.
It may be measured by counting the proportion of relevant people
performing the behaviors. For example,
60 percent of the employees in a particular work unit might be
performing the job enrichment behaviors
described above. Another measure of performance is the frequency
with which the new behaviors are
performed. In assessing frequency, it is important to account
for different variations of the same essential
behavior, as well as highly institutionalized behaviors that
need to be performed only infrequently.
3.
Preferences
.
This involves the degree to which organization members privately accept the
organizational
changes. This contrasts with acceptance based primarily
organizational sanctions or group pressures.
Private acceptance usually is reflected in people’s positive
attitudes toward the changes and can be
measured by the direction and intensity of those attitudes
across the members of the work unit receiving
the intervention. For example, a questionnaire assessing
members’ perceptions of a job enrichment
program might show that most employees have a strong positive
attitude toward making decisions,
analyzing feedback, and performing a variety of tasks.
4.
Normative
consensus
. This focuses on the extent
to which people agree about the appropriateness of
the organizational changes. This indicator of
institutionalization reflects how fully changes have become
part of the normative structure of the organization. Changes
persist to the degree members feel that they
should support them. For example, a job enrichment program would
become institutionalized to the extent
that employees support it and see it as appropriate to
organizational functioning.
5.
Value consensus
.
This is concerned with social consensus on values relevant to the organizational
changes. Values are beliefs about how people ought or ought not
to behave. They are abstractions from
more specific norms. Job enrichment, for example, is based on
values promoting employee self-control and
responsibility. Different behaviors associated with job
enrichment, such as making decision and performing
a variety of tasks, would persist to the extent that employees
widely share values of self-control and
responsibility.
These five indicators can be used to assess the level of
institutionalization of an OD intervention. The
more the indicators are present in a situation, the higher will
be the degree of institutionalization. Further;
these factors seem to follow a specific development order:
knowledge, performance, preferences, norms,
and values. People must first understand flew behaviors or
changes before they can perform them
effectively. Such performance generates rewards and punishments,
which in time affect people’s
preferences. As many individuals come to prefer the changes,
normative consensus about their
appropriateness develops. Finally, if there is normative
agreement about the changes reflecting a particular
set of values, over time there should be some consensus on those
values among organization members.
Given this developmental view of institutionalization, it is
implicit that whenever one of the last indicators
is present, all the previous ones are automatically included as
well. For example, if employees normatively
agree with the behaviors associated with job enrichment, then
they also have knowledge about the
behaviors, can perform them effectively, and prefer them. An OD
intervention is fully institutionalized only
when all five factors are present.
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