Late Game Changes
Companies started by strong founders, with their strong footprints, often go through jarring changes later in their development. The founder steps down or is pushed out as CEO, the company is acquired by an organizational Goliath, VC’s and Boards start advocating for major shifts in direction.
Even when these changes are for the best, employees and managers within this founder-built culture can be resistant. What can change advocates do when they are faced with such strong pushback?
Dr. Lee Ross – a Stanford Professor and leader in the field of social psychology – looks deeply into the notion of organizational change…
What are some social psychological factors that organizations should consider?
If you want to produce organization change, then you ask what’s producing resistance to that change and you have to focus as much on the resistance as you do on how you can compel behaviour.
Interestingly, it was exactly that example that got Kurt Lewin first interested in this problem because he believed that often group norms and prior group practices were the constraining factor. People often fear change because they think it will somehow leave them worse off, but they may also resent the very idea of change. They may feel that demands for change, especially if it involves giving weight to new considerations and values, may represent a questioning of the value of their past practices or past beliefs. Or it may just be that people feel a sense of loyalty to the old guard and their way of doing things. Lewin’s insight was that if he wanted to change a whole group, it was easier to try and first get a small number of people who were isolated from those group forces to show the change and demonstrate its value and they become agents of change instead of trying to change a whole organization at the same time.
The idea that changes in beliefs and priorities can follow from changes in behavior rather than vice versa is also important. Sometimes, instead of trying to convince people to change their behaviour through a lot of arguments, if you can suddenly manipulate the situation or behaviour so that it changes a little bit, the attitudes and values will follow from that.
There is a study that wasn’t done in an organizational context but I think you’ll see the relevance of it. The researchers found that in America we asked people whether they want to sign the back of their drivers license to make their organs available for transplant in the event of their death and even though people think it’s a good idea and generally approve only a minority make their organs available in this way. In some European countries it’s done in the reverse. The “default” option is that your organs are available unless you sign something on the back of your driver’s license making them not available. The study showed an enormous difference between two Scandinavian countries with a common culture; one with 10% of people signing up and 95% of people signing up.
In an organizational contexts defaults matter a lot. One of our former Stanford students went on to show that defaults play a role in whether people sign up for various kinds of saving and investment programs for retirement. If the company says, “if you don’t do anything we put your money into a very conservative retirement program but if you don’t want to be in the program you don’t have to be—just tell us or sign such and such document” Then once people are in that very conservative program they may do on to say “do I really want to be that conservative?” and maybe change to a more aggressive investment plan. But the number of people who actively opt out of all possible plans is apt to be small.
I would say naïve realism is certainly relevant in that people in an organizational context feel that they’re the ones who are seeing things in a reasonable way and the other people are blocking them because they’re either bringing some irrational bias or self-interest to bear. Of course, they may be right that the people who are blocking change are people who are motivated by self-interest. But what they’re not recognizing is that their interest in producing the change may also be influenced by self-interest.
This suggests the need for tolerance, that you can argue and you can think that people are wrong but you shouldn’t attribute it to character flaws or irrationality. You should explore what it is that’s making you see the world in a different way and have different practices.
For more insights from Dr. Ross see: https://blogs.ubc.ca/e101/feature-lee-ross/