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Organizational Structure

Organizational Structure
By:
Brian G. Nordmann

August 24, 2004

With every business that wants to grow and be profitable comes the inevitable, and that is change. Change is part of any organization be it a religious, educational, familial or our work environment. Without change we would not have walked on the moon, broken Olympic records or even have on-line classrooms. Change is not the challenge; it is managing that change as individuals that may be detrimental to the organization.
Kurt Lewin, a social psychologist, developed a change model that can help us understand the necessity for change and how to manage it a little better. Kreitner – Kinicki describes Lewin's change model as (2003) "a three-stage model of planned change which explained how to initiate, manage, and stabilize the change process. The three stages are unfreezing, changing and refreezing." (p 678) The unfreezing encourages the replacement of old actions with new action desired by management. Kreitner – Kinicki states that unfreezing centers around creating "the motivation to change." (p679) and that the stage of changing "entails providing employees with new information, new behavioral models, or new ways of looking at things." (p679) The third stage is described by Kreitner – Kinicki as refreezing. This is accomplished by "giving employees the chance to exhibit the new behaviors or attitudes." (p679)
Convincing any organization to change can be difficult even if it means the life or existence of the organization. Encouraging the desire for an individual to move outside of their comfort zone and to start something that is different or unfamiliar is the test of any leader. Goodstein and Burke discuss Lewin's change model as the first step to achieving indoring organizational changes by dealing with "resistance to change by unblocking the present system."(p48) Cryer and Elton state that "Behavior, as depicted by a point that moves from state A to state B…moves through all...