Chapter 9 --  Organizational Behavior in Education (6th)
Organizational Change

Introduction

It is believed that societies can direct the forces of change to suit goals and social values.

This has been shaped by the theories from two principal sources:  Marxist political and social theory and the empirically based social sciences.

Planned social change is supported by compatible educational systems.

Education has come to be viewed as a key to equality and equity in all societies.

Educational organizations are expected to preserve and transmit traditional values as well as to be vehicles for social change.  Therefore, organizational organizations must confront the integrations of stability AND change.

School Reform and Change

Reform efforts have not been effective in significantly altering the central core of assumptions and structures (the organizational culture) of schools.

The nucleus of the core of organizational behavior is power.  

We must come to terms with the power of culture to shape the assumptions and beliefs of people in the school if we are to bring about significant change.

School reform generally avoids dealing with power relationships in the school, which is central to bringing about educational change.

Power Relationships and School Restructuring

School reform means to give "new form" to a school changing it in fundamental ways.

The key to restructuring lies in changing power relationships in the school.

Schools can change through direction from outside (mandates from the state) or they may change from within (involving everyone in the organization in the process of change).

x - Sarason plan is an method of changing from within by involving everyone in the organization in the process.  It has made two major contributions in our thinking about bringing about organizational change in educational organizations:

• It conceptualizes the organization as a whole, not this part of that part.
• It is essentially and explicitly an educational rationale in that it seeks to promote the personal and vocational development of everyone.

Aims of Educational Reform

Sarason listed five aims that most agree would constitute major changes in the inner core of assumptions:

1. To reduce the wide gulf between the educational accomplishments of children of different social classes and racial backgrounds.
2. To get students to experience schooling as a process to which they  are willingly attracted, not a compulsory one they see as confining and boring.
3. To enable students to acquire knowledge and skills that are not merely rote learning or memorized abstractions, but rather are acquired in ways that interrelate the learning and give personal purpose, now and in the future, to each student.
4. To engender interest in and curiosity about human accomplishments, past and present.  To get students to want to know how the present contains the past (to want to know this as a way of enlarging their own identities: personal, social, and as citizens).
5. To acquaint students with the domain of career options and how schooling relates to these options in a fast-changing world of work.

The Tradition of Change in American Education

Natural diffusion-  new ideas and practices arise in some fashion and appeared in some unplanned way from school to school and from district to district (this meant schools change slowly).

Natural Diffusion Processes

It typically takes about 15 years for an innovation to spread to three percent of the school systems.

It then takes an additional 20 years for an almost complete diffusion into an area the size of an average state.

Numerous studies support the notion that high expenditure is generally associated with various indicators of superior school output.

Social Views of Diffusion

More recent research emphasizes the influences of social structure on the amount and rate of change.

When the superintendent was looked on as a leader by peers, as influential among other superintendents, and as being in communication with many of them, the district adopted innovations early and thoroughly.

Money spent is only one factor in the adaptability of schools and probably not even the major factor.

Planned, Managed Diffusion

The strategy by which money is spent may have grater impact on change than things such as per pupil expenditure.

One successful strategy involved three phases:

1. Inventing the new curriculum
2. Diffusion knowledge of the new curriculum widely and rapidly among high school science teachers
3. Getting the new curriculum adopted in local schools

Three Strategies of Planned Change

Robert Chin posited that three "strategic orientations" are useful in planning and managing change:

• Empirical-rational strategies
• Power-coercive strategies
• Normative-reeducative strategies

Empirical-Rational Strategies of Change

These strategies primarily focus on more closely linking the findings of research to the practices of education through improving communication between researchers and practitioners.

The scientific production of new knowledge and its use in daily activities is key to planned change in education.  It is referred to as Knowledge production and utilization (KPU).

Research, Development, and Diffusion (R, D, and D)

Research is the invention or discovery of new knowledge.

Development involves solving design problems, considering feasibility in "real-world" conditions, and cost.

The diffusion phase is the "marketing" activities of R, D, and D.  The aim is to make the new products available and attractive.

The "Agricultural Model"

Rural sociologists early discovered the processes and linkages that facilitated the rapid spread of new and better farming practices through the social system.

Agriculture has adopted innovations with less lag than schools have.

In a span of a quarter-century, the nation moved vigorously to systematize planned KPU in education though federal leadership.

Assumptions and Implications of KPU Approaches to Change

KPU approaches to change are based on two critical assumptions:

1. New knowledge (product, technique) will be perceived by potential adopters as desirable
2. That adopters (being rational and reasonable) will do what is desirable because it is in their own self interest

Innovation-  planned, novel, deliberate, specific change that is intended to help the organization:

1. achieve existing goals more effectively
   OR
2. achieve new goals

Other Empirical-Rational Strategies

• Personnel Selection and Replacement
  "Clearing out the dead-wood" & changing the criteria for certification and employment of new people.
• Utopian Thinking
  Rational attempts to project what might exist in the future, what the alternatives may be, and what ought to be can lead to planned efforts to direct the course of events toward a desired goal.

Power-Coercive Strategies of Change

Differs from an empirical-rational approach in its willingness to use sanctions (political, financial, or moral) in order to obtain compliance.

A Third Strategy:  Organizational Self-Renewal

The Rand Study of Federal Programs Supporting Educational Change

The research focused on two main issues:

1. The kinds of strategies and conditions that tend to promote change and the kinds that don't
2. The factors that promote or deter in institutionalization of innovation after the federal money runs out

Findings:  The differences among school districts in the extent to which they successfully adopted and implemented innovations are explained not so much by:

• the nature of the innovation itself
  OR
• the amount of fed. funding

but are explained by the characteristics of the organization and the management of the local school districts and schools themselves.

Schools that were successful in implementing innovative programs exhibited the following characterizes:

• tendency to reject rigidly packaged innovations that did not permit adaptation to local conditions
• strongly involved in developing their own local materials
• they engaged in continuous planning and preplanning
• they engaged in ongoing training of people
• consistent technical assistance was available locally for projects
• innovative projects received strong support from key administrators

A Normative-Reeducative Strategy

Based on an understanding of organizations and people in them that is different from the orientation usually held by the empirical-rational of power-coercive views (classical or bureaucratic).

The norms of the organization's interaction-influence system (attitudes, beliefs, and values) can be deliberately shifted to more productive norms by the action of those who populate the organization.

Organizational Health

To be affective, an organization must accomplish three essential core activities over time:

1. Achieve its goals.
2. Maintain itself internally.
3. Adapt to its environment.

Relatively good indicators of organizational health:

• Goal focus (people understand and accept goals?)
• Communication adequacy (vertical, horizontal, internal, external)
• Optimal power equalization (collaboration versus coercion)
• Human resources utilization (effective use of personnel)
• Cohesiveness (people like the organization and want to remain)
• Morale (feelings of well-being and satisfaction)
• Innovativeness (tendency to devise new ways of growth)
• Autonomy (tendency or organization to determine its own behavior)
• Adaptation (ability to change, correct, and adapt fast)
• Problem-solving adequacy (mechanisms for sensing and solving problems)

Organizational Self-Renewal

Ways of managing the interaction-influence system of the organization in ways that would stimulate creativity, promote growth of people in the organization, and facilitate solution of the organization's problems.

The process of renewal include the increased capacity to:

• sense and identify emerging problems
• establish goals, objectives, and priorities
• generate valid alternative solutions
• implement a selected alternative

Organizational Development (OD)

OD is the principal process for increasing the self-renewal capability of school districts and schools.

A coherent, systematically-planned, sustained effort at system self-study and improvement, focusing on change in formal and informal procedures, processes, norms of structures, using behavioral science concepts.

OD involves a cluster of at least ten concepts that characterize the process:

1. The Goal of OD-  to improve the functioning of the organization itself.
2. System renewal-  an organization can develop self-renewing characteristics.
3. A system approach-  emphasizes the wholeness of the organizational system and the interrelatedness of its subsystems (human, structural, technological, and task).
4. Focus on people-  the main concern is the human social system of the organization.
5. An educational strategy-  seeks to stimulate self-renewal by changing the behavior of people in the organization.
6. Learning through experience-  the concept of learning by doing.
7. Dealing with real problems-  applied to an organization in order to deal with existing problems.
8. A Planned Strategy-  the effort must be planned systematically.
9. Change agent-  participation of a change agent who had a vital and very specific role to play.
10. Involvement of top-level administration-  one cannot change part of the system in constructive ways without affecting other parts of the system.

A Sociotechnical View

The shift is not away from the clarity, order, and control associated with traditional views of organizational structure toward ill-defined, disorderly administration.

The shift is to a new and more functional basis for task analysis, structural arrangements, and selection and use of technology.

Technological change and innovation are likely to play an increased role in organizational change.

Force-Field Analysis

This approach sees a status quo as a state of equilibrium resulting from the balance between two opposing sets of forces.  When one of the forces is weakened or removed, equilibrium is upset resulting in change.

This approach led (Kurt Lewin) to a fundamental three-step change strategy:

1. The organization must be unfrozen
2. Introduce the change
3. Refreezing

Research on the Effectiveness of OD (Organizational Development)

Findings regarding OD in schools:

• Success is more likely when the school faculty senses a readiness to change and welcomes the OD project.
• Entering into OD may be the most critical phase of the project and requires a skilled and experienced OD consultant to avoid hidden pitfalls.
• Open, active support from administrators is critical to success.
• OD is more likely to be helpful in a school in which the staff is in substantial agreement on goals.
• An OD project can be thought of as consisting of four main phases:
  • Entry
  • Diagnosis of organizational problems
  • Institutionalization
  • Maintenance

According to Goodland in order to succeed a school must exhibit a desire to change.  The experimental intervention was to train faculty members of schools to engage in a four-step process called DDAE (dialogue, decision making, action, and evaluation).

W. Edwards Deming and Total Quality Management

Deming devoted much time to ideas about cooperation in the workplace:  power-sharing, the motivating power of a shared organizational vision, transforming leadership, win-win conflict management, and growth-enhancing organizational culture.

He became a powerful advocate of participative management, empowerment, and transforming leadership.

Transforming Change

Deming suggested that low-quality work rested on the shoulders of company managers.

Deming's TQM (Total Quality Management) goes to the heart of the organization's culture and becomes the basic operating principle of every participant in the organization.

Simple Change Different form Transforming Change

Schools have made many adaptive changes over the years, yet their core activities have remained remarkably stable.

Transforming change such as TQM transform the organization into something very different from what it was before.

Lessons from Deming's Work-  Transformation of an organization is characterized by a cluster of concepts:

1. The concept of Total Quality-  to make every part as right as possible, to do it the first time, and to strive for perfection.
2. Management Responsibility-  Primary responsibility for the shortcomings of organizational performance results from management behavior and are not due to carelessness of workers.
3. Testing is Not the Answer-  Eliminate the need of inspection on a mass basis by building quality into the product in the first place.
4. Intrinsic Motivation is Best-  Enlist willing workers & provide them with the proper tools rather than more testing.
5. Emphasize Problem-Solving-  Managers should enlist expertise of the worker.
6. Eliminate Performance Ratings-  Quality is improved through cooperation, not competition.
7. Emphasize Sensitivity to the Needs of the Customer-  Quality of organizational performance lies in placing the needs of the customer foremost.
8. Kaizen, or the Principle of Continuous Improvement-  A patient day-by-day, week-by-week process of discovery that never ends (constancy of purpose).
   Kaizen-  the ongoing pursuit of improvements by EVERY employee.

Conclusion

Robert chin's three-part typology for organizational change:

1. Empirical-rational strategies
   Change can be fostered by systematically inventing or discovering better ideas and making them available in useful form to schools.
2. Power-coercive strategies
   Based on the use of sanctions to compel the organization to change.
3. Normative-reeducative strategies
   Based on the notion of bringing about change in schools by improving their problem -solving capabilities as organizations.
   This process is referred to as organizational self-renewal.

By improving the organizational health of schools, it appears possible to make schools more proactive than defensive and to reach out responsively to adopt new ideas.

We know relatively little about the specific organizational characteristics of schools.  Assumptions about them have been derived largely from studies in other kinds of organizations.

Special properties of schools that must be considered in planning change:

• Populated by a nonvoluntary clientele
• Their goals are diffuse
• Their technical capacity is low
• They are loosely coupled systems
• Boundary management is difficult
• Schools are "domesticated" organizations
• Schools are part of a constrained decentralized system.

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Robert G. Owens. (1998).  Organizational Behavior in Education.  Needham Heights, MA: Ally and Bacon.