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a. Process Consultation
i. An outside consultant works with clients to understand the process events
managers must deal with.
ii. This is similar to sensitivity training in its assumption that interpersonal
involvement is important to highlight.
iii. The consultant coaches his/her client through the problem.
b. Team Building
i. Team building uses high-interaction group activities to increase trust and
openness among team members, improve coordinative efforts, and increase
team performance.
ii. Here, we emphasize the intragroup level, meaning organizational families
(command groups) as well as committees, project teams, self-managed teams,
and task groups.
iii. Team building typically includes goal-setting, development of interpersonal
relations among team members, role analysis to clarify each member’s role
and responsibilities, and team process analysis.
iv. It may emphasize or exclude certain activities, depending on the purpose of
the development effort and the specific problems with which the team is
confronted.
v. Basically, however, team building uses high interaction among members to
increase trust and openness.
c. Intergroup Development
i. A major area of concern in OD is dysfunctional conflict among groups.
ii. Intergroup development seeks to change groups’ attitudes, stereotypes, and
perceptions about each other.
iii. Here, training sessions closely resemble diversity training (in fact, diversity
training largely evolved from intergroup development in OD), except rather
than focusing on demographic differences, they focus on differences among
occupations, departments, or divisions within an organization.
iv. In one company, the engineers saw the accounting department as composed of
shy and conservative types and the human resources department as having a
bunch of “ultra-liberals more concerned that some protected group of
employees might get their feelings hurt than with the company making a
profit.”
v. Such stereotypes can have an obvious negative impact on coordination efforts
among departments.
vi. Among several approaches for improving intergroup relations, a popular one
emphasizes problem solving.
(a) Each group meets independently to list its perceptions of itself and of the
other group and how it believes the other group perceives it.
(b) The groups share their lists, discuss similarities and differences, and look
for the causes of disparities.
(c) Once they have identified the causes of the difficulty, the groups move to
the integration phase—developing solutions to improve relations between
them.
(d) Subgroups can be formed of members from each of the conflicting groups
to conduct further diagnosis and formulate alternative solutions.
d. Appreciative Inquiry
i. This type of OD brings to light the positive, rather than the conflict.
ii. Appreciative Inquiry (AI) asks participants to look forward and project the
future based on the positive components of an organization.
iii. AI is done in 4 steps:
(a) Discovery
(i) Discovery sets out to identify what people think are the organization’s
strengths.
(ii) Employees recount times they felt the organization worked best or
when they specifically felt most satisfied with their jobs.
(b) Dreaming
(i) Employees use information from the discovery phase to speculate on
possible futures, such as what the organization will be like in 5 years.
(c) Design
(i) Participants find a common vision of how the organization will look in
the future and agree on its unique qualities.
(d) Destiny
(i) Participants seek to define the organization’s destiny or how to fulfill
their dream, and they typically write action plans and develop
implementation strategies.
(e) AI has proven to be an effective change strategy in organizations such as
GTE, Roadway Express, and the U.S. Navy.
(f) The end result of AI was a renewed culture focused on winning attitudes
and behaviors.
II. Creating a Culture for Change
A. Introduction
1. We’ve considered how organizations can adapt to change.
2. But recently, some OB scholars have focused on a more proactive approach—how
organizations can embrace change by transforming their cultures. In this section, we
review two such approaches: stimulating an innovative culture and creating a learning
organization.
B. Managing a Paradox
1. In a paradox situation, we are required to balance tensions across various courses of
action. There is a constant process of finding a balancing point, a dynamic
equilibrium, among shifting priorities over time.
2. From this perspective, there is no such thing as a separate discipline of “change
management” because all management is dealing with constant change and
adaptation.
C. The idea of paradox sounds abstract, but more specific concepts have begun to emerge
from a growing body of research.
D. Several key paradoxes have been identified.
1. Learning is a paradox because it requires building on the past while rejecting it at the
same time.
2. Organizing is a paradox because it calls for setting direction and leading while
requiring empowerment and flexibility.
3. Performing is a paradox between creating organization-wide goals to concentrate
effort and recognizing the diverse goals of stakeholders inside and outside the
organization.
4. And finally, belonging is a paradox between establishing a sense of collective identity
and acknowledging our desire to be recognized and accepted as unique individuals.
E. Managers can learn a few lessons from paradox theory, which states the key paradox in
management is that there is no final optimal status for an organization.
1. The first lesson is that as the environment and members of the organization change,
different elements take on more or less importance.
2. There is some evidence that managers who think holistically and recognize the
importance of balancing paradoxical factors are more effective, especially in
generating adaptive and creative behavior in those they are managing.
F. Simulating a Culture of Innovation
1. Definition of innovation
a. Innovation, a more specialized kind of change, is a new idea applied to initiating
or improving a product, process, or services.
b. So all innovations imply change, but not all changes necessarily introduce new
ideas or lead to significant improvements.
c. Innovations can range from small incremental improvements, such as netbook
computers, to radical breakthroughs, such as Nissan’s electric Leaf car.
2. Sources of innovation
a. Structural variables are the most studied potential source of innovation.
i. First, organic structures positively influence innovation because they facilitate
flexibility, adaptation, and cross-fertilization.
ii. Second, long tenure in management is associated with innovation. Managerial
tenure apparently provides legitimacy and knowledge of how to accomplish
tasks and obtain desired outcomes.
iii. Third, innovation is nurtured where there are slack resources.
iv. Finally, inter-unit communication is high in innovative organizations. There is
a high use of committee, task forces, cross-functional teams and other
mechanisms that facilitate interaction.
b. Context and Innovation. Innovative organizations tend to have similar cultures.
i. They encourage experimentation.
ii. They reward both successes and failures.
iii. They celebrate mistakes.
iv. Managers in innovative organizations recognize that failures are a natural
by-product of venturing into the unknown.
c. Within the human resources category, innovative organizations actively promote
the training and development of their members so they keep current, offer high
job security so employees don’t fear getting fired for making mistakes, and
encourage individuals to become champions of change.
3. Idea Champions and Innovation. Once a new idea is developed, idea champions
actively and enthusiastically promote it, build support, overcome resistance, and
ensure it’s implemented.
a. Champions have common personality characteristics: extremely high
self-confidence, persistence, energy, and a tendency to take risks.
i. They also display characteristics associated with transformational leadership
—they inspire and energize others with their vision of an innovation’s
potential and their strong personal conviction about their mission. They are
also good at gaining the commitment of others.
b. Idea champions have jobs that provide considerable decision-making discretion;
this autonomy helps them introduce and implement innovations.
c. People in collectivist cultures prefer appeals for cross-functional support for
innovation efforts; people in high power distance cultures prefer champions to
work closely with those in authority to approve innovative activities before work
is begun; and the higher the uncertainty avoidance of a society, the more
champions should work within the organization’s rules and procedures to develop
the innovation.
d. These findings suggest that effective managers will alter their organization’s
championing strategies to reflect cultural values.
i. So, for instance, although idea champions in Russia might succeed by
ignoring budgetary limitations and working around confining procedures,
champions in Austria, Denmark, Germany, or other cultures high in
uncertainty avoidance will be more effective by closely following budgets and
procedures.
G. Creating a Learning Organization
1. What’s a learning organization? (Exhibit 18-6)
a. A learning organization is an organization that has developed the continuous
capacity to adapt and change.
b. Exhibit 18-6 summarizes the five basic characteristics of a learning organization.
i. It’s one in which people put aside their old ways of thinking, learn to be open
with each other, understand how their organization really works, form a plan
or vision everyone can agree on, and work together to achieve that vision.
c. Proponents of the learning organization envision it as a remedy for three
fundamental problems of traditional organizations: fragmentation, competition,
and reactiveness.
i. First, fragmentation based on specialization creates “walls” and “chimneys”
that separate different functions into independent and often warring fiefdoms.
ii. Second, an overemphasis on competition often undermines collaboration.
(a) Managers compete to show who is right, who knows more, or who is more
persuasive. Divisions compete when they ought to cooperate and share
knowledge. Team leaders compete to show who the best manager is.
iii. And third, reactiveness misdirects management’s attention to problem solving
rather than creation.
(a) The problem solver tries to make something go away, while a creator tries
to bring something new into being.
(b) An emphasis on reactiveness pushes out innovation and continuous
improvement and, in its place, encourages people to run around “putting
out fires.”
2. Managing learning
a. What can managers do to make their firms learning organizations?
i. Establish a strategy.
(a) Management needs to make explicit its commitment to change,
innovation, and continuous improvement.
ii. Redesign the organization’s structure.
(a) The formal structure can be a serious impediment to learning. Flattening
the structure, eliminating or combining departments, and increasing the
use of cross-functional teams reinforces interdependence and reduces
boundaries.
iii. Reshape the organization’s culture.
(a) To become a learning organization, managers must demonstrate by their
actions that taking risks and admitting failures are desirable.
(b) That means rewarding people who take chances and make mistakes.
(i) And management needs to encourage functional conflict.
H. Organizational Change and Stress
1. Researchers are increasingly studying the effects of organizational change on
employees.
a. We are interested in determining the specific causes and mitigating factors of
stress in order to learn how to manage organizational change effectively.
2. The overall findings are that organizational changes incorporating OB knowledge of
how people react to stressors may yield more effective results than organizational
changes that are only objectively managed through goal-setting.
3. Not surprisingly, the role of leadership is critical.
a. A recent study found that transformational leaders can help shape employee affect
so employees stay committed to the change and do not perceive it as stressful.
b. Another study indicated that a positive orientation toward change before specific
changes are planned will predict how employees deal with new initiatives.
4. Often, organizational changes are stressful because employees perceive aspects of the
changes as threatening.
a. These employees are more likely to quit, partially in reaction to their stress.
5. To reduce the perception of threat, employees need to see the organizational changes
as fair.
a. Research indicates that those who have a positive change orientation before
changes are planned are less likely to perceive changes as unfair or threatening.
III. Stress at Work
A. Introduction
1. Exhibit 18-7 shows work is, for most people, the most important source of stress in
life.
B. What Is Stress?
1. Stress is a dynamic condition in which an individual is confronted with an
opportunity, constraint, or demand related to what he/she desires and for which the
outcome is perceived to be both uncertain and important.
2. Stress is not necessarily bad in and of itself.
a. Individuals often use stress positively to rise to the occasion and perform at or
near their maximum.
3. Recently, researchers have argued that challenge stressors—or stressors associated
with workload, pressure to complete tasks, and time urgency—operate quite
differently from hindrance stressors—or stressors that keep you from reaching your
goals (for example, red tape, office politics, confusion over job responsibilities).
a. Although research is just starting to accumulate, early evidence suggests
challenge stressors produce less strain than hindrance stressors.
b. Researchers have sought to clarify the conditions under which each type of stress
exists.
i. It appears that employees who have a stronger affective commitment to their
organization can transfer psychological stress into greater focus and higher
sales performance, whereas employees with low levels of commitment
perform worse under stress.
ii. And when challenge stress increases, those with high levels of organizational
support have higher role-based performance, but those with low levels of
organizational support do not.
4. Demands and Resources. Typically, stress is associated with resources and demands.
a. Demands are responsibilities, pressures, obligations, and uncertainties individuals
face in the workplace.
b. Resources are things within an individual’s control that he or she can use to
resolve the demands.
c. To the extent you can apply resources to the demands on you—such as being
prepared, placing an event into perspective, or obtaining social support—you will
feel less stress.
d. Research suggests adequate resources help reduce the stressful nature of demands
when demands and resources match.
i. If emotional demands are stressing you, having emotional resources in the
form of social support is especially important.
ii. Thus, under the demands-resources perspective, having resources to cope with
stress is just as important in offsetting it as demands are in increasing it.
5. Allostasis. All this may give you the impression that individuals are seeking a steady
state in which demands perfectly match resources. While early research tended to
emphasize such a homeostatic, or balanced equilibrium, perspective, it has now
become clear that no single ideal state exists.
a. Instead, it’s more accurate to talk about allostatic models in which demands shift,
resources shift, and systems of addressing imbalances shift. By allostasis, we
work to find stability by changing our behaviors and attitudes.
b. It all depends on the allostatic load, or the cumulative effect of stressors on us
given the resources we draw upon.
6. So, much like organizations are in a constant state of change and flux, we respond to
stress processes by continually adapting to both internal and external sources, and our
stability is constantly redefined.
C. Potential Sources of Stress
1. As the model in Exhibit 18-8 shows, there are three categories of potential stressors:
environmental, organizational, and personal.
2. Environmental factors.
a. Environmental uncertainty influences stress levels among employees in an
organization.
b. Changes in the business cycle create economic uncertainties.
c. Political uncertainties in some countries can be stress inducing.
d. Technological uncertainty can cause stress because new innovations can make an
employee’s skills and experience obsolete in a very short period of time.
3. Organizational factors
a. Pressures to avoid errors or complete tasks in a limited time period, work
overload, a demanding and insensitive boss, and unpleasant coworkers are a few
examples.
b. Task demands are factors related to a person’s job.
i. They include the design of the individual’s job (autonomy, task variety, degree
of automation), working conditions, and the physical work layout.
c. Role demands relate to pressures that are a function of the role an individual plays
in an organization.
i. Role conflicts create expectations that may be hard to reconcile or satisfy.
ii. Role overload is experienced when the employee is expected to do more than
time permits.
iii. Role ambiguity is created when role expectations are not clearly understood.
d. Interpersonal demands are pressures created by other employees.
i. A rapidly growing body of research has also shown that negative coworker
and supervisor behaviors, including fights, bullying, incivility, racial
harassment, and sexual harassment, are especially strongly related to stress at
work.
4. Personal factors
a. These are factors in the employee’s personal life.
i. Primarily, these factors are family issues, personal economic problems, and
inherent personality characteristics.
b. National surveys consistently show that people hold family and personal
relationships dear.
c. Economic problems can be created by individuals overextending their financial
resources.
5. Stressors are additive.
a. When we review stressors individually, it’s easy to overlook that stress is an
additive phenomenon—it builds up.
b. A single stressor may be relatively unimportant in and of itself, but if it’s added to
an already high level of stress, it can be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
c. To appraise the total amount of stress an individual is under, we have to sum up
his or her opportunity stresses, constraint stresses, and demand stresses.
D. Individual Differences
1. Four individual difference variables moderate the relationship between potential
stressors and experienced stress: perception, job experience, social support, and
personality.
a. Perception: Moderates the relationship between a potential stress condition and an
employee’s reaction to it.
i. Stress potential doesn’t lie in objective conditions; it lies in an employee’s
interpretation of those conditions.
b. Job experience: The evidence indicates that experience on the job tends to be
negatively related to work stress.
i. Two explanations:
(a) First is the idea of selective withdrawal. Voluntary turnover is more
probable among people who experience more stress.
(b) Second, people eventually develop coping mechanisms to deal with stress.
c. Social support: Relationships with coworkers or supervisors can buffer the impact
of stress.
i. Social support acts as a palliative, mitigating the negative effects of even
high-strain jobs.
d. Personality trait
i. Perhaps the most widely studied personality trait in stress is neuroticism,
discussed in Chapter 5.
ii. As you might expect, neurotic individuals are more prone to experience
psychological strain.
iii. Evidence suggests that neurotic individuals are more prone to believe there
are stressors in their work environments, so part of the problem is that they
believe their environments are more threatening.
iv. They also tend to select less adaptive coping mechanisms, relying on
avoidance as a way of dealing with problems rather than attempting to resolve
them.
e. Workaholism is another personal characteristic related to stress levels.
i. Workaholics are people obsessed with their work; they put in an enormous
number of hours, think about work even when not working, and create
additional work responsibilities to satisfy an inner compulsion to work more.
ii. In some ways, they might seem like ideal employees.
iii. That’s probably why when most people are asked in interviews what their
greatest weakness is, they reflexively say, “I just work too hard.”
iv. There is a difference between working hard and working compulsively.
v. Workaholics are not necessarily more productive than other employees,
despite their extreme efforts.
vi. The strain of putting in such a high level of work effort eventually begins to
wear on the workaholic, leading to higher levels of work-life conflict and
psychological burnout.
E. Cultural Differences
1. Research suggests the job conditions that cause stress show some differences across
cultures.
2. One study revealed that whereas U.S. employees were stressed by a lack of control,
Chinese employees were stressed by job evaluations and lack of training.
a. It doesn’t appear that personality effects on stress are different across cultures,
however.
3. One study of employees in Hungary, Italy, the United Kingdom, Israel, and the
United States found Type A personality traits (see Chapter 5) predicted stress equally
well across countries.
4. A study of 5,270 managers from 20 countries found individuals from individualistic
countries such as the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom experienced
higher levels of stress due to work interfering with family than did individuals from
collectivist countries like Asia and Latin America.
a. The authors proposed that this may occur because, in collectivist cultures,
working extra hours is seen as a sacrifice to help the family, whereas in
individualistic cultures, work is seen as a means to personal achievement that
takes away from the family.
b. Evidence suggests that stressors are associated with perceived stress and strains
among employees in different countries.
c. In other words, stress is equally bad for employees of all cultures.
F. Consequences of Stress at Work
1. Physiological symptoms
a. Most early concern with stress was directed at physiological symptoms because
most researchers were specialists in the health and medical sciences.
i. Their work led to the conclusion that stress could create changes in
metabolism, increase heart and breathing rates and blood pressure, bring on
headaches, and induce heart attacks.
ii. Evidence now clearly suggests stress may have harmful physiological effects.
b. One study linked stressful job demands to increased susceptibility to
upper-respiratory illnesses and poor immune system functioning, especially for
individuals with low self-efficacy.
c. A long-term study conducted in the United Kingdom found that job strain was
associated with higher levels of coronary heart disease.
d. Still another study conducted with Danish human services workers found that
higher levels of psychological burnout at the work-unit level were related to
significantly higher levels of sickness absence.
e. Many other studies have shown similar results linking work stress to a variety of
indicators of poor health.
2. Psychological symptoms
a. Job dissatisfaction is an obvious cause of stress.
b. Multiple and conflicting demands—lack of clarity as to the incumbent’s duties,
authority, and responsibilities—increase stress and dissatisfaction.
c. The less control people have over the pace of their work, the greater the stress and
dissatisfaction.
3. Behavioral symptoms
a. Research on behavior and stress has been conducted across several countries and
over time, and the relationships appear relatively consistent.
b. Behavior-related stress symptoms include reductions in productivity, absence, and
turnover, as well as changes in eating habits, increased smoking or consumption
of alcohol, rapid speech, fidgeting, and sleep disorders.
c. A significant amount of research has investigated the stress–performance
relationship.
d. The most widely studied pattern of this relationship is the inverted U. (Exhibit
18-9)
i. The logic underlying the figure is that low to moderate levels of stress
stimulate the body and increase its ability to react.
ii. Individuals then often perform their tasks better, more intensely, or more
rapidly.
iii. But too much stress places unattainable demands on a person, which result in
lower performance.
e. In spite of the popularity and intuitive appeal of the inverted U model, it doesn’t
get a lot of empirical support.
i. So we should be careful of assuming it accurately depicts the
stress–performance relationship.
f. As we mentioned earlier, researchers have begun to differentiate challenge and
hindrance stressors, showing that these two forms of stress have opposite effects
on job behaviors, especially job performance.
g. A meta-analysis of responses from more than 35,000 individuals showed role
ambiguity, role conflict, role overload, job insecurity, environmental uncertainty,
and situational constraints were all consistently negatively related to job
performance.
h. There is also evidence that challenge stress improves job performance in a
supportive work environment, whereas hindrance stress reduces job performance
in all work environments.
IV. Managing Stress
A. Introduction
1. Because low to moderate levels of stress can be functional and lead to higher
performance, management may not be concerned when employees experience them.
2. Employees, however, are likely to perceive even low levels of stress as undesirable.
a. It’s not unlikely, therefore, for employees and management to have different
notions of what constitutes an acceptable level of stress on the job.
3. What management may consider “a positive stimulus that keeps the adrenaline
running” is very likely to be seen as “excessive pressure” by the employee.
B. Individual approaches
1. An employee can take personal responsibility for reducing stress levels.
2. Individual strategies that have proven effective include time-management techniques,
increased physical exercise, relaxation training, and expanded social support
networks.
3. Many people manage their time poorly.
a. The well-organized employee, like the well-organized student, can often
accomplish twice as much as the person who is poorly organized.
b. So an understanding and utilization of basic time-management principles can help
individuals better cope with tensions created by job demands.
i. A few of the best-known time-management principles are:
(a) Making daily lists of activities to be accomplished.
(b) Prioritizing activities by importance and urgency.
(c) Scheduling activities according to the priorities set.
(d) Knowing your daily cycle and handling the most demanding parts of your
job when you are most alert and productive.
(e) Avoiding electronic distractions like frequently checking e-mail which can
limit attention and reduce efficiency.
