The new VC has held a senior management group meeting where the change strategy was presented. A number of breakout groups were formed to discuss the changes. Feedback from the groups was essentially supportive of the strategy to move from faculties to schools. The main concerns were with the process, the perception that the institution had been thrust into a state of uncertainty and concerns about how staff will respond to this. It was agreed that staff should provide their thoughts either in teams or as individuals and feed these back to a generic email address so that the VC can start to gather view. The other main area of concern was the lack of detail in the current proposal and the fact that several senior managers have been given notice that their posts are at risk of redundancy. This was seen by many as potentially destabilising for the whole organization as there is now the possibility that some of these staff will leave before replacements have been recruited leaving the institution without leadership at a critical and turbulent time.
I am now very keen to start interviewing for the assignment as there is a lot of rich data in circulation. I would really like to interview about ten people but at the moment this is not possible. I will however record any useful data and views here.
The issues raised at the meeting have clear resonance with the three core theories that I am considering using:
- Sensemaking
- Institutional theory
- Organizational Justice theory (OJ)
Issues relating to Organizational Justice are already coming to the surface, specifically issues around how the proposals for change have been developed and how these have been communicated. Staff are generally accepting of the need for the organization to change.
In terms of OJ there are some real connections between what is going on and the theory.
- Distributive Justice: The form of organizational justice that focuses on people’s beliefs that they have received fair amounts of valued work-related outcomes
- Procedural Justice: People’s perceptions of the fairness of the procedures used to determine the outcomes they receive
- Interpersonal Justice: People’s perceptions of the fairness of the manner in which they are treated by other people
- Informational Justice: People’s perceptions of the fairness of the information used as the basis for making a decision
The issue at the moment relates most strongly to Procedural Justice, Interpersonal Justice and Informational Justice. People do not understand the process that has brought about the changes, people do not consider the process to be fair and there is a deficit of information.
OJ also relates strongly to individual and team performance and has been shown to have an impact on customer service. These issues are clearly of concern to the organization. My question for the assignment research project is:
- What are the key issues that employees attend to during organizational change?
- How do these issues differ across the hierarchical levels of non-supervisors, supervisors and executives?
The interview question is:
Tell me what you think is good and what is bad about the change that is occurring.
I am planning on using Convergent Interviewing which is a form of semi-structured interviewing. The structure is supplied by the initial question and then the interviewer leaves the interviewee to speak for as long as they like. This can be up to 90 minutes. The interviewer can use small prompts to keep the interviewer talking such as asking ‘what else’, ‘how do you fell about that’, nodding but mainly being very attentive.
In some ways the change is happening about a year too soon. By the time I get to asking the question for the main project the change situation will be about a year into the change. It’ is likely that some of the staff in the institution will no longer be working there in a year. This is a little frustrating.