BUSI 504 Week 3 Discussion Board Forum 2 Example

Discussion Board Forum 2: Shared Diagnosis and Participation in Change

BUSI 504 Leading Organizational Change, Discussion Board Forum 2 Thread and Replies

Thread by [Student Name]

The choice of term and the three classmates are composites; the textbook, the research articles and the Scripture cited are real, and the requirements follow Liberty's public course guide for BUSI 504.

Thread

Spector (2013) argues that effective change begins with mutual engagement: managers and employees examining together how the organization is performing and why, before anyone proposes a redesign. The term for the result is shared diagnosis. The logic is that people commit to solutions for problems they have recognized themselves, and that employees often see causes that executives cannot.

The idea has a long research history. Coch and French (1948) studied a pajama factory in Virginia where job changes routinely caused output to fall and turnover to rise. They compared a group that was simply told about a change with groups that took part, through representatives or directly, in planning how the new work would be done. The groups that participated recovered their former productivity quickly and then exceeded it, while the group that had no voice showed lower output, more hostility toward management and several resignations. When members of that group later participated in a second change, they recovered as fast as the others, which suggested that the difference lay in the process rather than in the people.

Shared diagnosis also needs a structure, or the conversation drifts toward complaints about whatever is most visible. Weisbord (1976) offered a six-box model, covering what the organization is for, how work is divided, how people and units relate, how they are rewarded, who keeps the boxes in balance and what supporting mechanisms exist, as places a group can look for trouble, with or without a formal theory, and he urged that the gap between the formal system and how work is actually done be examined in each box. A simple framework like this lets employees who are not consultants take part in diagnosis.

Recent research supports the early findings. Lines (2004) studied participation in strategic change in a large Norwegian telecommunications company and found that participation was associated with less resistance, higher commitment to the organization and greater achievement of the change's goals. The evidence across sixty years points one way: involving people in finding the problem is one of the conditions of success, not a courtesy extended to them.

Scripture shows the same pattern. When the Greek-speaking believers in Jerusalem complained that their widows were being overlooked in the daily distribution of food, the apostles did not decide the matter alone. They gathered the whole community, explained the problem and asked the people to choose seven trusted men to oversee the work; the proposal pleased everyone, and the church continued to grow (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, Acts 6:1-7).

Reply to Jasmine

Jasmine, your thread on organizational redesign explained well how Spector (2013) treats structure as following diagnosis rather than leading it. Your example of the regional bank that merged two departments before anyone understood why loan approvals were slow is a good illustration of what happens when the order is reversed.

One source that could strengthen your thread is Galbraith (1995), who argued that structure is only one of several design choices that must fit together, along with strategy, processes, rewards and people. In his star model, a change in structure that is not matched by changes in processes and rewards tends to fail, because the old processes pull people back into the old patterns. That may explain your bank example, and it suggests the redesign was diagnosed too narrowly from the start. The merged department had a single manager on paper, but loan officers were still evaluated under two different scorecards, so they kept working as two departments.

I would also connect your thread to the participation research. If the loan officers had taken part in diagnosing the delay, they might have pointed out that the real bottleneck was a duplicated credit review, a process problem that a structural merger could not fix. Coch and French (1948) found that the people doing the work often knew how it should be organized better than the planners did.

Do you think the bank's leaders chose a structural fix because it was visible and quick, even though they suspected the problem lay elsewhere? That pattern seems common, and it might be worth naming in your thread.

Reply to Brandon

Brandon, your thread on the congruence model was clear, and I liked your point that the model's value is in asking how well the parts fit rather than how good each part is. Nadler and Tushman (1980), as you explained, picture an organization as an open system turning inputs, its environment, resources and history, into outputs through four components: the tasks to be done, the individuals doing them, the official arrangements of structure and systems, and the informal arrangements of norms and relationships. Performance depends on congruence, the fit among those components.

Your thread made me think the congruence model and shared diagnosis need each other. The model tells a group where to look, but the informal organization, the norms, relationships and unwritten rules, is hard for executives to see from the top. Employees are usually the best source of information on that component. A diagnosis done only by senior managers might rate the formal structure and the work accurately and miss the informal organization entirely.

Your example of the hospital pharmacy shows this. Leaders saw a staffing problem, but the technicians you interviewed described an informal rule that nobody questioned a senior pharmacist's order, which slowed corrections. That is a misfit between the people and the informal organization, and no staffing increase would have solved it. Lines (2004) found that participation improved change outcomes, and your example suggests one reason: participants supply information that otherwise never reaches the people designing the change.

How would you suggest leaders gather that information honestly, given that employees may not want to criticize senior colleagues openly? Anonymous surveys are one option, but they lose the conversation that makes shared diagnosis work. An outside facilitator running small group sessions without the senior pharmacists present might be a better compromise, at least for the first round.

Reply to Nicole

Nicole, your thread on the Burke-Litwin model did a good job explaining the difference between its transformational and transactional factors. Burke and Litwin (1992) separate transformational factors, among them pressures from outside, the mission and strategy, top leadership and culture, whose change demands genuinely new behavior, from transactional factors such as structure, management practices and systems, which concern day-to-day operations. Your point that most change programs try to work only on the transactional side was well made.

I would add that the model's distinction helps decide who should be part of the diagnosis. Transformational factors usually require senior leaders to take part, because mission and culture cannot be redefined at lower levels alone. Transactional factors are often diagnosed best by front-line employees, who experience the systems daily. Weisbord (1976) made a related argument when he suggested looking for the gap between how the formal system is supposed to work and how work is actually done, which only people close to the work can describe.

Your example of the retailer that rolled out a new scheduling system without addressing its culture of last-minute changes is a good case of treating a transformational problem with a transactional fix. The culture of last-minute changes came from store managers who were rewarded for sales spikes, not for stable staffing. Do you think a shared diagnosis involving both store managers and hourly staff would have surfaced that conflict before the new system was purchased? I suspect it would have, because hourly staff were the ones absorbing the last-minute changes and would have named the cause quickly. The harder question is whether the managers would have accepted a diagnosis that pointed at their own incentives.

References

Burke, W. W., & Litwin, G. H. (1992). A causal model of organizational performance and change. Journal of Management, 18(3), 523-545. https://doi.org/10.1177/014920639201800306

Coch, L., & French, J. R. P., Jr. (1948). Overcoming resistance to change. Human Relations, 1(4), 512-532. https://doi.org/10.1177/001872674800100408

English Standard Version Bible. (2016). Crossway. (Original work published 2001)

Galbraith, J. R. (1995). Designing organizations: An executive briefing on strategy, structure, and process. Jossey-Bass.

Lines, R. (2004). Influence of participation in strategic change: Resistance, organizational commitment and change goal achievement. Journal of Change Management, 4(3), 193-215.

Nadler, D. A., & Tushman, M. L. (1980). A model for diagnosing organizational behavior. Organizational Dynamics, 9(2), 35-51. https://doi.org/10.1016/0090-2616(80)90039-X

Spector, B. (2013). Implementing organizational change: Theory into practice (3rd ed.). Pearson.

Weisbord, M. R. (1976). Organizational diagnosis: Six places to look for trouble with or without a theory. Group & Organization Studies, 1(4), 430-447. https://doi.org/10.1177/105960117600100405