Exploring How to Diagnose Members’ Concerns About Changes in Core Elements of Organizations

Abstract

This study explores Hinkle’s implication grid as a useful technique for identifying the core characteristics of an organization by defining the concerns that members have seeing the core characteristics disappear. Hinkle designed the proposed method to assess how difficult it might be to change a core element of people’s personalities; here, the author has adapted the method and applied it in two different and evolving organizations. These two applications demonstrate the method’s practical value: It can help us avoid the assumption that changing core attributes is painful for an organization’s members, and we can start to measure, in concrete terms, whether pain is actually experienced, what type of pain it is, and in which part of the organization it is most intense. Thus, it is difficult to change these core elements because a person’s capacity to interact socially with others depends on his or her ability to form a mental representation of the group he or she belongs to. Social reality has a coherent structure, and we make sense of organizational events on the basis of this structure, as well as on our own place in the organization.

Beyond Power Struggles: A Multilevel Perspective on Incongruences at the Interface of Practice, Knowledge, and Identity in Radical Organizational Change

“…To anticipate negative reactions to change, change managers should ask themselves for whom the envisaged changes may be seen as drawbacks. In this context, for example, Illia (2009) suggested a method to diagnose the extent of members' concerns with regard to the changes. In case radical changes on the organizational level cannot be achieved with the existing members, the organization may have to change (some of) its members.…”