BUSI 700 Week 6 Group DB Forum 4 Example

Group Discussion Board Forum 4: Thread, Group Presentation and Reply

BUSI 700 Doctor of Business Administration Orientation, Group Discussion Board Forum 4 (thread, group presentation and reply)

Thread by [Student Name]

The prompt, the workplace change, the group and the classmates are composites standing in for the course's own; Johnson's book and the review cited are real; the requirements follow Liberty's public course guide for BUSI 700.

The prompt asked us to apply Johnson's characters to a change we have experienced at work and to evaluate the book's advice. Two years ago, the billing office I managed at a regional hospital replaced manual medical coding with an automated system that reads clinical notes and suggests codes for staff to review. Johnson (1998) describes two mice, Sniff and Scurry, who notice when the cheese is gone and run off to find more, and two little people, Hem and Haw, who expect the cheese to return and suffer for it. I saw all four in my office.

One senior coder read about the system months before we bought it and was ready on the first day, a clear Sniff. Two newer staff members volunteered to test it, Scurry in action. One coder with twenty years of experience insisted for months that the system would fail and refused to learn its shortcuts; he was Hem. And several staff, like Haw, resisted at first and then adapted once they saw the system cut their backlog. The book's central advice, to anticipate change, monitor it and move with it, fits the people who did well.

The book's explanation for the people who struggled is less convincing. Johnson presents resistance as the product of fear and attachment to comfort. Oreg et al. (2011) gathered 79 quantitative studies from 1948 through 2007 on the people at the receiving end of organizational change, and the model they built from them traces reactions to several antecedents: the characteristics of the employees, the setting inside the organization, including how far staff trust their managers, the change process, including communication and participation, and the change's perceived benefit or harm to the people affected. Our Hem was not only afraid; he had good reason to think the system made his twenty years of expertise worth less. In our office, the coders who adapted fastest had been involved in testing the system and knew their jobs were safe, while the most resistant had been told little and feared for his position.

The research also suggests a practical step the book omits. Because perceived harm drives resistance, a leader can reduce it by changing what employees lose. When we later retrained our most experienced coder to audit the system's suggestions, a role that drew directly on his expertise, his opposition faded within weeks. The cheese had moved, but someone had shown him where the new cheese was.

My conclusion is that the book is useful advice for individuals facing change they cannot control, but incomplete guidance for leaders. A manager who reads it as an explanation of resistance may blame employees for reactions that the change process itself produced. The better lesson is to involve people early and to answer honestly the question every employee asks: what does this mean for me?

Group Presentation (posted to the class-wide forum)

Group 3 applied Who Moved My Cheese? to changes members had experienced: hospital billing automation, a bank merger, a new enterprise system and a move to remote work. In every case we found Johnson's four characters, and his advice to anticipate and adapt to change described the people who fared best. But we agreed that the book explains resistance too simply. Research reviewing 79 studies of change reactions shows that employees respond to how change is managed, how much they trust their leaders and whether they expect to gain or lose. In our examples, the people who resisted most had often been told least. Our verdict: the book is good advice for individuals and an incomplete guide for managers, who should read it alongside research on the change process.

Reply to Group 1

Group 1, your presentation argued that Who Moved My Cheese? blames employees for problems created by leaders and that it was used in the 1990s to make layoffs seem like a failure of attitude. That criticism is serious, and our group reached a similar concern: the book treats resistance as a personal flaw when it is often a reasonable response to a poorly explained change.

I would narrow the criticism slightly. The book is addressed to individuals, and for an individual, the advice to notice change early and avoid clinging to the past is sound regardless of who caused the change. The problem arises when managers use it as an explanation for employees' behavior. In the review by Oreg et al. (2011), the change process, including communication and participation, and employees' perceptions of benefit and harm shape their reactions, so leaders who distribute the book instead of explaining the change are skipping the step that most affects how people respond. A fair reading, then, is that the book is not wrong but is aimed at the wrong audience when leaders hand it out. Did your group find examples in which giving employees a real voice in a change reduced resistance more than encouraging them to adapt?

References

Johnson, S. (1998). Who moved my cheese? An amazing way to deal with change in your work and in your life. G. P. Putnam's Sons.

Oreg, S., Vakola, M., & Armenakis, A. (2011). Change recipients' reactions to organizational change: A 60-year review of quantitative studies. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 47(4), 461-524. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021886310396550