Cultural Change In Organizational Culture

Organizational culture can be defined as beliefs and norms shared by a large group of people within a company. These beliefs and norms shape how people behave and relate to one another, their task and the broader environment (Alvesson and Sveningsson, 2015; Canato and Ravasi, 2015). Culture is hard to measure and difficult to get a grip on, however, it is still considered to be one of the most significant aspects to consider when it comes to change efforts being made. This is because culture can both be essential in the success for a change project, but it can also be the reason why it fails. Furthermore, even in cases where the change is not directly about the culture, it is affected (Alvesson and Sveningsson, 2015). Not only is culture something

Managing change includes keeping track of all aspects of the change, hence, the planning, the implementing and making sure the change is sustained. Thus, there are almost a countless amount of factors to consider, which makes this task complicated. Management can take two forms; controlling or shaping. The former deals with top-down changes and the latter focuses on involving the employees in the process and providing encouragement (Alvesson and Sveningsson,

When Technocom became a subsidiary for Global Tech (GT), top management also decided that they needed a new culture (Case Compendium, 2015). This mainly due to the fact that they needed to be more customer focused and to work in a different way than they had when they were a part of GT. A great many hours was spent discussing the change that needed to be done and how to make it so. Reading the case it felt promising at first since the ideas and the planning of the change had potential. However, the Technocom case shows that it is definitely not enough to have a good plan. The problems arouse in the implementation stage. There seemed to be confusion as to who was responsible for implementing the change, which led to a lack of commitment. This resulted the change to never really take place (Case compendium, 2015). Another reason why the change might not have been so successful is due to the lack of expressiveness from the managers. This is was Alvesson and Sveningsson (2015) call symbolic anorexia or cultural thinness. Symbols create meaning in a simplistic and powerful way and can be anything from an event to a story. Symbols often appeal to both the logical and the emotional sides of a person (Alvesson and Sveningsson, 2015). Since there was a lack of symbols, the employees did not understand the new culture or the need for it. Instead it seems as though the existing culture grew stronger (Sveningsson,