Managing Organizational Change
for Schools
Terminology
 Invention
The process of developing new technologies, projects, or procedures
for an organization.
 Innovation
Deliberate, novel, specific change, which is thought to be more
efficacious in accomplishing the goals of a system.
 Organizational change
The process of altering the behavior, structures, procedures, purposes,
or output of some unit within an organization
(Hanson, 1996)
 Difference between individual change and organization change:
Individual change: determined by personality needs and values
Organization change: Determined by more formal, structured
characteristics of a system (Katz and Kahn)
 Government Transformation Program
 Institutionalization is a process of making a
change routine; it becomes part of the ordinary
life of the school
 Organizational innovation refers to organizations
that strive to break through, change status quo,
develop characteristics in terms of products,
processes or services so that organizational
performance can be enhanced. (Zhao and
Ordonez de Pablos)
Michael Fullen
 Educational change is a process of coming to grips with
the multiple realities of people who are the main
participants in implementing change. The leader who
presupposes what the change should be and acts in ways
which preclude others’ realities is bound to fail.
Books/Chapters Dealing with Change
 The Third Wave by Outlet
 Megatrends: Ten New Directions Transforming Our Lives by John
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Naisbitt
Cunningham, W. G., & Cordeiro, P. A. 2000. Educational
Administration: A Problem-Based Approach. Chapter 3 School
Reform. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
Mark, Hanson, E. 1996. Educational Administration and
Organization Behavior. Chapter 12 Educational Change. Boston:
Allyn and Bacon.
Lunenburg, F, C., & Ornstein, A. C. 1996. Educational
Administration: Concepts and Practice. Chapter 8 Organizational
Change. Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Company.
Owens, Robert. 1998. Organizational Behavior in Education.
Chapter 9 Organizational Change. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
Journals
Books
Megatrends: Ten New Directions Transforming Our
Lives
John Naisbitt.1982
Industrial society moving to an information society
2. Forced technology moving to high technology
3. National economy moving to world economy
4. Short term moving to long term
5. Centralization moving to decentralization
6. Institutional help moving to self help
7. Representative democracy moving to participatory
democracy
8. Hierarchies moving to networking
9. Power base of north part of U.S moving to southern U.S.
10. Either/or options moving to multiple options.
1.
Megatrends 2000: Ten New Directions for the
1990s.
John Naisbitt and Patricia Aburdene (1990)
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This is a new version of the original Megatrends (1982) book
The new trends are:
Global economic boom of the 1990s
Renaissance in the arts
Emergence of free-market socialism
Global lifestyles and cultural nationalism
Privatization of the welfare state
Rise of the pacific rim
The 1990s as a decade of women in leadership
The age of biology,
Religious revival of the third millennium, and
Triumph of the individual.
Educational Reforms
 21st Century American Education Action in
U.S.A.
 Japan train the next generation with survival
strength
 European Union transform member countries into
knowledge Europe
 Singapore builds thinking schools and learning
country
Elements of Innovative Schools
Schools excel when:
Their leaders are empowered to think big
The entire community (all stakeholders)
share a vision of change
They collaborate and explore best practices
world wide
National Key Result Areas (NKRAs)
 Crime prevention
 Reducing government corruption
 Increased access to quality education
 Improvements in the standard of living for low
income groups
 Upgrades rural infrastructure
 Improvement in public transportation
Units of Change (Sergiovanni)
 The individual
Needs, interests, relationships
 The school
School climate and school culture
 The workflow
The change goals, the change targets, the change protocols, the
curriculum and teaching requirements, and the supervisory and staff
development support
 The political system
Administrative action, congruent reward system, budget available,
teacher union acceptance, school board acceptance, administrative
commitment, and community acceptance
The Change Agent
 A change agent is a professional whose role is to
influence the clients’ behavior in a desired direction
 The responsibilities of the change agent vary from
complex to simplistic and tough to permissive
 The types of change agents:
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White-hat Change Agent
Machiavellians Change Agent
Guerrillas Change Agent
The Hatchet man Change agent
 White-hat Change Agent
Most change agents fall into this category
The change agent has an engaging personality, maintains
close bonds based on trust, and practises democratic
procedures at all time.
The steps to be taken by the change agent (Havelock)
Relationship: Establishes a viable relationship with the
client system
Diagnosis: Determine whether the client is aware of
his/her problems
Resources: Identifies and obtain the resources
Solution: Generates a range of alternatives and makes a
choice
Acceptance: The change agent helps the client system to
develop awareness and interests by describing, detailing,
discussing and demonstrating and finally adopt the
innovation
Stabilization: Develop the internal capability to sustain
innovation without the continued presence of the change
agent
 The Machiavellian Change Agent
The change agent might choose to be quite invisible, engineering
events from behind the scene
Rules for the agent (Baldridge)
Concentrate your effort
Know when to fight
Learn the history
Build a coalition
Join external constituencies
Use committees effectively
Use the formal system
Follow through to push the decision flow
Glance backward when the change is completed
 Hatchet men Change Agents
Their arrival on the scene is a clear signal that major
organizational surgery has been called for
In the field of education, we don’t see many hatchet men
change agents
 The organizational Guerrilla
Guerrilla change agents work from inside the
organization, usually as an employee
The guerrilla works against the formal leadership in an
attempt to bring about change
Of all forms of the change agents, the guerrilla is
probably the least understood
Types of Change
 Planned change
Conscious and deliberate attempt to manage events so that the
outcome is redirected by design to some predetermined end.
Anyone can initiate a program of planned change, whether or not
he/she is formally charged with the responsibility of directing an
organization.
 Spontaneous change
An alteration that emerges in a short time frame as a result of natural
circumstances and random occurrences
It just happens
No grand design directs the course of events
 Evolutionary change
Long-range, cumulative consequences of major and
minor alterations in the organization
Three Strategies of Planned Change
(Robert Chin)
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3.
Empirical-rational change
Power-coercive change
Normative-reeducation change
Empirical-rational change
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The linkages between researchers and practitioners
It is related to knowledge production and utilization (KPU)
The aim is to bridge the gap between theory and practice
Research, development, and diffusion (R, D, and D)
 Power-coercive strategies
Willingness to use sanctions in order to obtain
compliance from adopters
It requires that individuals comply with the wishes fo
those who are in positions superior to theirs
In empirical-rational and power coercive strategies,
organizations are made to change
 Both empirical-rational and power-coercive strategies
believe that best ideas are best developed outside of the
organization and the organization is the target of external
forces for change
 A normative-reeducative strategy
 Norms of the organization’s interaction-influence system
(culture) can be deliberately shifted to more productive
norms by collaborative action of people who populate the
organization
 The shift from a close climate to a open climate (Andrew
Halpin)
 Moving from System 1 management style to System 4
(Rensis Likert)
Force-field Analysis (Kurt Lewin)
 Force field analysis is a management technique developed by
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Kurt Lewin, a pioneer in the field of social sciences, for
diagnosing situations.
Diagnostic in nature
It allows the preparation of plans for specific action designed to
achieve the changes sought
The success of such plans will depend on the clarity with which the
likely consequences of proposed action are perceived
For major organizational sub-systems are:
Task
Technology
Structure
human
 Lewin assumes that in any situation there are both driving and
restraining forces that influence any change that may occur
 Driving Forces
Driving forces are those forces affecting a situation that are
pushing in a particular direction
They tend to initiate a change and keep it going
 Restraining Forces
Restraining forces are forces acting to restrain or decrease the
driving forces
Apathy, hostility, and poor maintenance of equipment may be
examples of restraining forces against increased production
 Equilibrium is reached when the sum of the driving forces
equals the sum of the restraining forces.
To carry out a Force Field Analysis
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State the current situation
Describe the ideal situation
Identify where the current situation will go if no action is taken
List all the forces driving change toward your ideal situation
List all the forces resisting change toward your ideal situation
Interrogate all of the forces: Are they valid? Can they be changed?
Which are the critical forces?
 Allocate a score to each of the forces using a numerical scale e.g. (1)
extremely weak (10) extremely strong
 Chart the forces by listing (to strength scale) the driving forces on the
left and restraining forces on the right
 The viability of the change programme can be affected by decreasing
the strength of the restraining forces or by increasing the strength of
driving forces.
Pressures for
Organizational Change
Lunnerburg & Ornstein, 1996)
 Government intervention
It is top-down hierarchy reforms
 Society’s values
Herzberg’s hygiene factors such as salary, job security,
working conditions, supervision, organizational policies,
and status. The absence of these factors results in
employee job dissatisfaction
The quality of work life: employee participation in the
organization
The values of equity and efficiency
 Technological change and knowledge explosion
Part of it is due to research and development efforts
within an organization
A great deal of development comes from outside
Development of new technologies increases the
accessibility to higher education such as continuing
education courses, life-long learning and etc.
ICT, smart schools, collaboration with British Aerospace
and INTEL, e-book and etc.
 Processes and people
 Process factors include:
Communication which is inadequate
Poor quality decision making
Inappropriate leadership
Nonexistent of motivation
 People factors include:
Poor performance of teachers and students
High absenteeism
High dropout rates
High teacher turnover
Low teacher morale and motivation
Poor community relationns
Targeting Process of
Change Management
 Elements of the targeting process:
Focus of change
Level of change
Potency of change
Impetus of change
 Focus of change
Its tasks: from traditional forms of instruction to individualized
instruction,
Its structure: decentralization, departmentalization, communication
channels and etc.
Its technology: introduction of computer-assisted instruction and etc.
Its people: new skills, values, motivation and etc
 Level of change
Wilfred Brown has identified four levels of an
organization:
Manifest organization: Portrayed by line-and-staff chart
that represents the formal organization
Assumed organization: The conventional wisdom about
how the system actually works
Extant organization: How the system actually works
Requisite organization: This is an ideal organization, the
way how an organization should function
 Potency of change
 It refers to the degree which a change requires a significant departure
from existing condition
 Level of potency depends on resources, time, energy, power, and
goodwill that are involved in the change initiative
 Impetus for change
 Three types of change (Getzels):
Enforced change: Cultural dimension outside the organization brings
external pressure on the system to which it must respond.
Expedient change: The mechanism of change is reaction
Essential change: The mechanism of change is volunteerism.
Resistance to Change
(Mark Hanson, 1996)
 Resistance to change occurs at organizational level and at the
individual level
 Organizational level
 The educational system
Centralized vs. decentralized system
 Bureaucratic organization
Formal bureaucratic structure such as hierarchical levels, role
relationships, standardized procedures, control from the top, values of
disciplined and compliance and etc.
Superordinates have rights and subordinates have obligations
(Abbott)
A study by Moeller and Charters found that teaches in highly
bureaucratic systems had significantly higher, not lower, sense of
power than those in less bureaucratic schools.
Bureaucratic may not always be detrimental to change
 Accountability
If test score are low, teachers are blamed. This will lead
to the wrong focus for initiating change
 Goal displacement
Goal displacement refers to a situation when following
the rules becomes the goal of the individual functionary
or even of the organization itself (Robert Merton)
 Domesticated organization
The domestication of schools builds in layers of
protective insulation (can be penetrated but not easily)
 Costs: Time, energy, money
In educational organizations, it is rather difficult to obtain
accurate measures of benefits as they relate to costs
Sunk costs also act as forces resistant to change
 Resistance cycle
Four-stage cycle (Goodwin Watson)
Stage one: resistance appears massive
Stage two: The pro and con forces become visible
Stage three: The battle between the pro and con is on
Stage four: The supporters of change is victorious.
 Resistance to change at individual level
 Vested interests
Vested interests come in social (dissolve of inform group,
social status), political (lost of power), economic (source
of income) and psychological forms (insecure).
 Mobility expectations
Three career motivational patterns (Presthus)
Up-ward mobile
Indifferent
ambivalent
 Search behavior
There is evidence that the present procedures are not working well
and results in anxiety
 Psychological systems
Psychological forces that generate forces towards change (Goodwin
Watson):
Habit
Primary (success from completing a task)
Selective perception and retention
Dependence
Insecurity and regression
 Rejection stages
Ignorance/lack of dissemination (The infor is not easily
available)
Suspended judgment/data not logically compelling (I
want to wait and see how good it is before I try)
Situational/data not materially compelling (It costs too
much to use in time and money)
Personal/data not psychologically compelling (I don’t
know if I can operate the equipment)
Experimental/present or past trials (I tried them once and
they aren’t any good)
 Resistance from the lowerarchy
The power in the lowerarchy can generate forces that
resist change
Lack of experimental ethic
Conditions for Successful Change
To Happen (Mark Hanson)
 Anxiety, difficulties, and uncertainty are intrinsic to all
successful change
 Change is a journey where learning and adjustment must
take place
 Education change is a problem-solving process
 Change requires resources: training, materials, new space,
personnel, and etc.)
 Change in education needs an integrated source of power
to direct it. Therefore the management of change is better
when it is carried out by a cross-role group