Looking at organizational change through the construction and reconstruction of the underpinning values of the organization through interactions among stakeholders.
| Autor | Leitao, Sueli dos Santos |
| Cargo | Texto en ingl |
I INTRODUCTION
Although the belief that we are living through times of sweeping changes has probably been present at all times (Grey, 2002), information technologies have been driving changes at a faster pace over the past few decades. In a world that is changing continuously in social and economic terms, flexibility, customization, learning, streamlined manufacturing, virtuality and self-organizing teams have become part of the daily routines of formal organizations (Orlikowski, 1996) that want to be competitive.
In turn, mentions are also made of a new society, resulting from social groundswells that lead to the development of people who are more firmly committed to human, social and ecological issues, with higher appreciation of a "culture of caring about the existence of others, the dignity of others, the well-being of others, including in businesses or non-profit organizations" (Teixeira & Paz, 2009, p. 2).
This paper studies the organizational becoming process through the construction over time of values found in interactions among stakeholders in a service sector organization in Brazil that strove to attain economic and social goals between 2005 and 2009, when the effects of the global meltdown that began in 2008 were already becoming apparent. If, on one hand, markets demand increasingly faster responses from organizational leaders in order to keep their enterprises competitive, on the other they can no longer ignore demands arising from social changes taking place within a broader context, which are reflected in the development of human beings who are more aware of their roles in society. According to Beer, Eisenstat, Foote, Fredberg, & Norrgren (2011), enterprises must generate value for their stakeholders, including the community in which it is embedded, with profits being an expected consequence of the business rather than its main purpose. It is thus interesting to attempt to understand how profit-making organizations respond to this setting.
However, most planned change processes fail to attain the desired success (Bovey & Hede, 2001; Heracleous, 2002; Hernandes & Caldas, 2001; Pascale, Millemann, & Gioia, 2000; Tsoukas & Chia, 2002), in parallel with difficulties encountered by organizations in identifying the factors that pave the way for effective organizational change (Pascale et al., 2000). A managerial trend is apparent in the literature on episodic organizational change (Weick & Quinn, 1999), leading towards the implementation of change processes focused on tangible aspects, such as strategies, structures, processes and technologies (Pascale et al., 2000), with little attention devoted to the human element (Bovey & Hede, 2001; Oswick, Grant, Michelson, & Wailes, 2005; Vince & Broussine, 1996).
Oswick et al. (2005), when discussing the future direction for studies of organizational change, prompted by an upsurge in interest in studying the intangible aspects of organizations, suggest that change management should consist of meanings management. Although there is disagreement over whether meanings can be managed, in the traditional sense of the word, it is understood that concern with meaning as socially constructed by organizational actors, viewed in this study as stakeholders, should be a focus of attention for organizational change processes, bearing in mind that these meanings are not simply in people's minds, but also in actions, expressed in language. It is necessary to look at who is engaged in the actions, and the context within which these actions occur, allowing individuals to create meaning and naturally modify them (Tsoukas, 2005). Along these lines, organizational change is defined in this study as an ongoing process (Weick & Quinn, 1999) of reconstructing networks of beliefs and habits of action among organizational actors, based on intersubjective experiences of the quotidian of the organization (Tsoukas & Chia, 2002).
Beliefs and action habits constructed through interactions may be understood as values and practices, respectively. Domenico (2008) defines values related to organizational competition (VROC) as beliefs that are socially constructed through interactions among stakeholders, which guide their actions in seeking resources, being produced and reproduced through language and reflected in practices, understood as actions repeated over time to the point of becoming theories-in-use (Verbeke, 2000).
Consequently, studying organizational change as organizational becoming means analyzing how values are continually constructed and reproduced through language, which serves, according to Morgan and Sturdy (2000), as a basis for actors to create meanings and act within social contexts. It is thus felt that communication acts lead to the construction and sharing of meanings in interactions among stakeholders, while beliefs and practices are reiterated and/or revised in an ongoing process of becoming.
In order to attain our goal, the subject of the field survey was a tax consulting firm, whose organizational becoming involves the proposal to construct a company by people and for people, seeking an even balance between promoting human and social development and bringing in financial earnings for the business. As a contribution to business management, this study suggests various lenses through which leaders can examine the phenomenon of change in formal organizations, exploring aspects (values constructed socially by the stakeholders) that receive little attention in change processes. Additionally, this study highlights initiatives attempting to implement management models outside the mainstream that, according to Beer etal. (2011), is necessarily for enterprises pursing long-term results, and which must consequently be a matter of concern for investors.
At the academic level, we intend to expand the studies of ongoing organizational change introducing the social construction and reconstruction of values through stakeholder interactions, a concept developed by Domenico (2007) and Domenico and Teixeira (2014), as a way to show how continuous change happens in formal organizations, considered here as "constituted by the interaction processes among its members" (Langley & Tsoukas, 2012, p. 4). Academic studies in the management field that view change as something with no beginning or end are becoming more common now, in the XXI century, although this idea dates back to Ancient Greece, when Heraclitus described a river not as a substance, but rather as a flow that is constantly changing (Langley, Smallman, Tsoukas, & Van de Ven, 2013; Tsoukas & Chia, 2002). This paper is intended to increase the relatively small number of studies in Brazil approached from this standpoint (1), which seems the most appropriate to us in view of the complexity of the modern world, instead of an episodic approach that was conceptualized in and for a more stable competitive environment (Orlikowski, 1996; Weick & Quinn, 1999), when competition and institutional and market demands were relatively lighter.
In addition to this Introduction, this paper presents a brief theoretical overview of organizational change and values, followed by the methodological procedures, a presentation and discussion of the findings, and some final remarks.
2 ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE
In the management sphere, two aspects placed the issue of organizational change at the hub of research activities during the 1990s, such as the ability to respond to the need for change, seen as the source of comparative advantages and underpinning organizational survival, in parallel to the rising complexity of change processes (Greenwood & Hinings, 1996). The quest for explaining the phenomenon of organizational change has triggered a wide diversity of concepts and approaches in studies of this topic, resulting in a robust but muddled field (Armenakis & Bedeian, 1999).
Among other contributions, three major reviews of scientific output on organizational change have been prepared by Van de Ven and Poole (1995), Armenakis and Bedeian (1999) and Weick and Quinn (1999) with the end purpose of understanding how and why changes occur. Although the proposed categorizations contribute to an understanding of this phenomenon, "a way of seeing is a way of not seeing" (Poggie, 1965, as cited in Van de Ven & Poole, 1995, p. 510). It may thus be assumed that there are other ways to look at studies of organizational change, with one option being an analysis from different paradigmatic angles (Morgan, 2005).
The force of positivism in the Social Sciences is theoretically sustained by functionalism, which explains the occurrence of an attribute in function of its outcomes. The purpose of functionalism is the quest for efficiency, where social structures are shaped by the need to adapt and meet the needs of society. Consequently, organizational change is explained as the phenomenon of adaptation and evolution, in which the environment imposes organizational choices where the awareness of the actors becomes superfluous (Donaldson, 2003).
Through the functionalist approach, studies of organizational change attempt to offer prescriptions and models through which leaders can administer change processes, which may be justified by the prevailing interest in explaining organizational change through the technical and tangible aspects of organizations, as discussed by Vince and Broussine (1996) and Bovey and Hede (2001). However, Oswick et al. (2005) discuss whether the prevailing interest in studying change through these aspects between the 1950s and the 1970s, when mass production, complex paperwork, standardization and control were the goals in formal organizations (Orlikowski, 1996), has been outstripped by rising interest in intangible phenomena (organizational learning, knowledge management, narrative methods and issues related to image and identity), resulting in studies guided by non-positivist paradigms. Other ways of looking at the phenomenon of...
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