Q&A Hero

Q: Action research is a problem-focused process of organizational change.

Q: Action research is the process of determining whether the change process is ethical or not.

Q: Pilot projects get diffused quickly when employees understand how the practices in a pilot project apply to them even though they are in a completely different functional area.

Q: Diffusion of change is more likely to succeed if some people who have worked under the new system are moved to other areas of the organization.

Q: Pilot projects are usually more flexible and less risky than centralized, organization-wide programs.

Q: Transformational leaders act as agents of organizational change.

Q: The group of people with a commitment to a change is called a dominant coalition.

Q: Change agents can often single handedly lead a change initiative.

Q: Information systems and reward systems can both help to refreeze the desired conditions in organizational change.

Q: Organizational rewards are powerful systems that refreeze behaviors.

Q: Coercion should never be used to manage change in organizations.

Q: Firing people is the least desirable way to change organizations.

Q: The best way to manage resistance to change among those who will clearly lose out from the change is to introduce coercion practices.

Q: One problem with negotiation is that it tends to produce compliance rather than commitment to the change process.

Q: Unless the change must occur quickly or employee interests are highly incompatible with the organization's needs, employee involvement is almost an essential part of the change process.

Q: Learning increases employees' change self-efficacy.

Q: In order to bring about a change in a particular organization, employees need to break old routines and adopt new role patterns. The stress management strategy is best suited for this situation.

Q: The communication strategy should be applied to reduce resistance to change where the change must occur quickly with little financial cost.

Q: Negotiation and coercion are necessary for people who will clearly gain something from the change and in cases where the speed of change is critical.

Q: Learning is the highest priority and first strategy required for any organizational change.

Q: Increasing the driving forces alone will not bring about change.

Q: The urgency for change must always be initiated from a problem-oriented perspective in order to be effective.

Q: Customer feedback provides a human element that can energize employees to change their current behavior patterns.

Q: Exposing employees to external forces can strengthen the urgency for change, but leaders often need to begin the change process before problems come knocking at the company's door.

Q: To bring about effective change, leaders typically create an urgency to change by buffering employees from the external environment.

Q: Unfreezing occurs by making the driving forces stronger, weakening the restraining forces, or a combination of both.

Q: Unfreezing occurs when the driving forces are weaker than the restraining forces.

Q: Team norms can contribute to resistance to change.

Q: One reason why employees typically resist change is that they dislike predictable role patterns.

Q: Fear of the unknown usually motivates employees to support organizational change.

Q: Even when present conditions are very bad, most people do not welcome an uncertain future.

Q: When employees apply a cost-benefit analysis to a potential change, they consider only their own self-interest.

Q: Resistance detracts from employees' sense of procedural justice.

Q: Resistance is a form of voice.

Q: Resistance is motivational; it potentially engages people to think about change strategy and process.

Q: Resistance is a form of conflict that should be viewed as relationship conflict.

Q: When people support change, they typically assume that it is others who need to change.

Q: Subtle resistance is much more common than overt resistance.

Q: Refreezing involves producing disequilibrium between the current state and the future state.

Q: The force field analysis model states that stability is achieved only when the driving forces for change subside and are replaced by restraining forces acting in the same direction.

Q: According to the force field analysis model, stability occurs when the driving forces and restraining forces are of approximately equal strength in opposite directions.

Q: The main problem with the encounter stage of socialization is that outsiders rely on indirect information about what it is like to work in the organization.

Q: The three stages of socialization are pre-employment socialization encounter, and role management.

Q: Organizational socialization begins on the first day of employment and continues throughout one's career within the company.

Q: A transactional psychological contract is a long-term attachment to a company.

Q: An individual's beliefs about the terms and conditions of a reciprocal exchange agreement between that person and an employer is called a mental model.

Q: Organizational socialization is a process of both learning and adjustment.

Q: Organizational socialization is the process by which individuals create social norms to interact within the organization.

Q: Attraction-selection-attrition (ASA) theory explains why companies are able to attract and select people who fit the culture, but later on have difficulty in creating a stronger culture.

Q: A strong culture depends on a stable workforce.

Q: Reward systems have little or no effect on strengthening corporate culture.

Q: One way to change an organization's culture is to change its artifacts.

Q: Organizational culture can sometimes be reshaped by applying transformational leadership and organizational change practices.

Q: The deculturation strategy is most appropriate when the merging companies are in unrelated industries.

Q: Assimilation is the most common form of cultural merging strategy.

Q: The assimilation strategy is the most likely to result in a culture clash.

Q: The first step in a bicultural audit is to identify strategies and prepare action plans to bridge the two organizations' cultures.

Q: Organizations with adaptive cultures are unable to maintain a stable value system and, consequently, tend to perform poorly in the long run.

Q: Very strong cultures often become dysfunctional when they discourage dissenting subcultural values.

Q: Efficiency-focused cultures are likely to be more important for companies in environments with strong competition and standardized products.

Q: In corporate cults, the culture is so strong that it focuses employees on one mental model so much that they may fail to see issues from different perspectives.

Q: Corporate culture makes it harder for employees to understand what is expected of them.

Q: Organizational culture fulfills people's need for social identity.

Q: Organizational culture is a social control mechanism.

Q: Having a strong culture is always a positive influence on organizational effectiveness.

Q: The strength of an organization's culture refers to how widely and deeply employees hold the company's dominant values and assumptions.

Q: The kinds of desks an organization has can convey cultural meaning.

Q: Ceremonies are more formal artifacts than rituals.

Q: An example of a ritual is how visitors are greeted as they enter the company's offices.

Q: Language reflects an organization's dominant values but not the values of its subcultures.

Q: Organizational stories are the programmed routines of daily organizational life that dramatize an organization's culture.

Q: To have their greatest effect, organizational stories must describe real people and recount true past events.

Q: Rituals support organizational culture by providing social prescriptions of the ways things should or should not be done around the organization.

Q: Artifacts provide valuable evidence about a company's culture.

Q: Artifacts of organizational culture may include the building's design, the way people are greeted and the food served in the company's cafeteria.

Q: Organizational countercultures can potentially help the organization maintain its standards of performance and ethical behavior.

Q: Organizational countercultures can potentially create conflict and dissension among employees.

Q: Organizational countercultures further strengthen the organization's dominant culture.

Q: Subcultures contradict the dominant culture by espousing parallel assumptions and values.

Q: Many of the popular organizational culture models and measures oversimplify the variety of organizational cultures and correctly assume that organizations can easily be identified within these categories.