Chapter 13. ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE IN R&D SETTINGS

This chapter is for those who are thinking of introducing change in their organization and is designed to give the manager an overall idea of what goes on in organizational change and how to evaluate it. When the change is substantial, the manager should get help from consultants either inside or outside the organization.

Organizational change can focus on individuals, dyads (e.g., supervisor–subordinate), teams, or the whole organization. One can focus on cognitive skills (e.g., how to analyze a problem), affective changes (e.g., how to feel about one's competitors), or behaviors (e.g., how to behave correctly in particular situations). Thus, potentially, there are 4 × 3 = 12 kinds of organizational changes. However, to simplify this chapter we will discuss only some of these: changing individuals (cognitive, affective, behavioral), teams, or the whole organization.

Before deciding what aspect of the organization to improve, it is important to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the organization. A needs assessment is highly desirable. This can be done by interviewing at all levels of the organization, focusing on what is done well and what is done badly and needs improvement in the views of the participants.

In fact, such needs assessment should be done routinely every few years, if not more frequently, because few R&D organizations are doing today what they did five years ago. Research projects, technology, and customer needs keep changing. To be responsive to such changes, the organization needs to change.

The first step is to determine specifically what needs to change. Some behaviors can be changed directly; in some cases, attitudes and values linked too many behaviors need to change. The strategic planning of the organization must be coordinated with the activities of each part of the organization. Then a needs assessment and a plan for change can be developed that can indicate whether people, teams, or the organization needs to change, and whether the change is mostly cognitive, affective, or behavioral. Standard operating procedures may need to be developed that will respond to the changed environment of the laboratory.

Organizational change is particularly difficult to implement in an academic institution. Cole and colleagues (1994, p. 9) has suggested that at universities "we have neither the rules that permit for orderly governance of choice nor the conceptual frameworks to guide those choices." In nonacademic research organizations, whether they are industrial or governmental, change can be achieved by two means: the ability to replace people and the ability to make personnel accountable to management for performance and for achieving mutually agreed-upon goals. In universities, neither of these tools is readily available (Kennedy, 1994). Each academic unit within a university has its own history and tradition. Thus, each unit has to develop means to implement change, especially the ability to redistribute resources (faculty, laboratory space, student support, and so on), to support new areas of knowledge, and to deemphasize areas no longer relevant.