“I had the same experience,” Annette said. “The clients have such detailed histories, and they need to share their whole story. I talked to a woman whose boyfriend shoved her against a wall and broke her wrist. She started to cry, and I was thinking that I can’t very well interrupt her and say, ‘Sorry, ma’am, but that’s Question 65. We’re still on Question 14, so can you tell me your combined annual income?’ And I had three of those same intakes yesterday. I went home completely drained last night.”
Monica nodded. “I’ve heard stories like that, too. The part I hate is when I have to pick up the paperwork out of the inbox and file the motion when I didn’t do the intake. The other day Julie started shouting at me because I missed a note on an intake that Christina did and I had to refile the motion. I almost missed the deadline but I stayed 2 hours later than usual and got it all done. It was gratifying but emotionally exhausting. It’s hard even to come in sometimes. I wonder, are we even making progress here?”
“Now what’s she talking about?” Annette looked up at Julie.
“So that’s why you need to make sure that Dave has your weekly schedule, so he can keep the appointment schedule accurate with hourly time blocks for intakes,” Julie concluded.
Julie returned to her office. There were two messages from the Dylan Foundation president wanting to know about last quarter’s statistics. He had threatened to pull funding for next year unless the center began to show more progress in winning cases where disabled clients were about to be evicted. She knew that the staff had done great work recently, but they had only begun to compile the statistics and she could not yet prove it with charts and graphs. He’d be fine after she met with him, she thought. She made a mental note to bring two recent success story case studies to her meeting with him.
Rafael appeared in the doorway. “Julie, what do we do when the service date on the subpoena doesn’t match the date on the submission form? Can you show me how we address that in the reply?”
“Yes. Well, actually, ask Kyle because I showed him the same thing last week,” Julie answered.
“Kyle’s not here until 3, and I have to have the motion done for the client to pick up at noon,” Rafael said.
“Okay. Just give me a few minutes and I’ll be right there,” Julie replied.
“Thanks,” Rafael said.
Jean was right behind him. “Julie, I have an urgent housing motion here that needs to be filed. Do you want this now?”
Julie took the intake form and looked through it. A woman with a $900 monthly income and an infant son and 2-year-old daughter received an eviction notice for being one day late on her $800 rent. A court filing would be due tomorrow.
“I have a meeting this afternoon and can’t do it today. Why don’t you put it in the hallway box and maybe someone can get to it today? Otherwise, I’ll get to it tomorrow,” Julie said.
Jean paused for a moment. “Okay, I’ll do that,” she said.
Note
1. Rokeach (1973) and other psychologists over the past decades have done a great deal of work to distinguish among values, attitudes, beliefs, assumptions, and so on. For our purposes in this chapter, these distinctions are not critical.
Chapter Four Foundations of Organizational Change
In 1996, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch hired a new editor, Cole Campbell, to address declining readership and increased competition. Among the changes instituted in the newsroom was a shift away from reporters being assigned to beats and toward journalistic reporting teams. The staff was generally enthusiastic and optimistic that this change would be a positive one that would increase the paper’s quality, and they welcomed the team-based governance structure. The vision was that teams comprising members from the news and business divisions would collaborate on customer-focus and problem-solving initiatives to improve the paper. As the change was instituted, however, morale declined. Several mid-level editor and reporter positions were eliminated or restructured, and both reporters and editors had to reapply for jobs as team members or leaders in the new structure. Many staff members were frustrated that they were not consulted or involved in making the changes successful. Soon reporters began to dislike working in teams and declared that nothing had actually changed in the quality of the paper. Many award-winning and highly respected journalists left the paper voluntarily, citing the changes in the newsroom. In 2000, Campbell resigned. Circulation had declined from 320,000 to less than 295,000 during his 4-year tenure (Gade & Perry, 2003).
What could have been done differently to make this change successful?
What factors do you think contribute to making a successful change?
As you have no doubt experienced, achieving change is difficult. This story of organizational change at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch has likely been replicated at countless organizations. While it may be tempting to blame the leader and to dismiss failed attempts as yet another example of poorly managed change, it is beneficial to understand what happened in situations like this one and what other explanations are possible. They can teach us about where attempts at change go wrong and how organizational change should be managed differently.
Master the content at edge.sagepub.com/andersonod5e
As we have discussed in previous chapters, organization development (OD) was primarily concerned early on with incremental changes that organizations could experience through interventions that targeted individual development. In recent years, with an emphasis on organizational effectiveness, OD has directed attention toward larger-scale and strategic change. Organizational change is the context (and purpose) of OD work, and a key competency of OD professionals is understanding the nature of organizational change, including what factors help to make changes succeed and what factors cause them to fail. In this chapter we will explore the nature of organizational change, including how researchers and practitioners think about change. We will explore the levels and characteristics of changes that organizations seek to make, and we will look at the research and writings of scholars and practitioners that develop theoretical models for how changes occur, as well as the fundamental issues that make changes successful.
To do that, we will also delve briefly into organizational theory. We will discuss two ways of looking at organizations: as systems and as they are socially constructed. The organization-as-system model has evolved from general systems theory over the past 50 to 60 years. Organizations-as-socially-constructed is a relatively more recent evolution of organizational theory, becoming prominent in the past 20 to 30 years. While these approaches are contradictory in some respects, containing some fundamentally different assumptions at their core, these ways of looking at organizations offer useful and different insights. They suggest approaches to organizational change that can help practitioners as they interpret how to best help a client achieve change in a particular organization. As you learn about these perspectives and models of organizational change in this chapter, keep in mind the practical challenges faced by those who lead organizational change and whether there is one perspective or approach that resonates more with you and your experiences.
You may be wondering why we need to delve into such theoretical detail just to understand how to manage organizational change at a practical level. The answer is that our approach to change depends on the underlying assumptions and beliefs that we have about how organizations work. In other words, “The way change facilitators think about causes of change determines how they contract, assess, intervene, and evaluate during their