Let me finish with my sentiments on change and transformative leadership. Over many postings, I have been describing and explaining what I consider are the factors affecting organizational change. Early on, I contextualized these postings as a concern for school efforts to potentially institute changes in their civics curriculum content. For those of you who regularly read this blog, you know that one of my overarching goals is to promote a curricular view of what civics content should be. Over the years, I have made the case that the present civics curriculum choices have been guided by the natural rights construct. I have also suggested that that construct should not hold such a central role, but that curriculum workers and teachers should adopt another construct, federation theory. To make such a change, those who teach civics and government should view their subject matter from a different perspective. Since we are talking about a social concern, how we view government and politics – how we view the content – can and often does reflect how we see and feel about how we get along with others. I am always taken aback by how little most people appreciate how political our lives are. Politics transcends government and is an element of just about every segment of our social lives. There is politics in families, at church, at the workplace, at the supermarket; you name the social setting and chances are that politics is involved. In all of these places, questions of who gets what, where, and how are bound to emerge. Basically, the question I have been dealing with in these postings dedicated to change theory and leadership is whether those decisions are to be made by someone in charge using such managerial assets as rewards and/or punishments or be a general process by which those involved share in the responsibility to identify, plan, and implement the solution for political problems. In general, I would claim that if the problem is limited in terms of the number of people affected or the issues are more superficial than those central to the organization, perhaps a “person in charge” can lead a staff to institute needed change. But if the number of people is significant and/or the issue(s) is (are) either foundational or central to the organization’s mission, then a more “we the people” approach seems to be necessary to achieve satisfactory results.
Why? Because, as with the case of changing curricular content and the way people see that content, this type of change is not a simple “do this instead of that” solution, but it is “see it this way instead of that way” and “feel about it this way instead of that way” type of change. For this sort of organizational change – transformative change – rewards and punishments will not lead to a change of mind or heart on the part of those who need to change their behavior. What is called for is a normative change and that is achieved only by effective re-education. Therefore, a normative-re-educative strategy needs to be implemented. This has been identified by change experts as a type of change strategy that agents are trained in to be able to advise organizations in their efforts to institute such change.
Change studies seem to indicate that the distinction between subordinates (changed-for) and leaders can be a contributing factor in whether the leader will have an impact on how change efforts are seen by the changed-for. If the leader is seen as a reflection of themselves – the leader is just one of us – then the leader is likely to have less of an impact. Further, if the staff is manned by self-motivated and self-confident individuals, then messages from the leader will have limited effect on the perceptions and behaviors of subordinates.[1] This is a bit ironic. The goal of normative-re-educative strategies is to get the planned-for to exhibit self-motivated initiatives, but to do so within the overall efforts of the group. It can be, that if a staff is populated with such self-assured people, it is likely that an active and dynamic oriented culture prevails in such organizations and the potential of such transformative change is not such a big deal, but instead is the continuous modus operandi. Two comments here: how exciting it is that such a possibility exists and I have never been a member of such a school staff nor have I run across it.
And with that, I conclude for now my comments concerning change. As I mentioned in an earlier posting, this whole area of change is fascinating and worth our study. This is so not only in terms of curricular change, but also in terms of political study in general.
[1] Wyle, D. C. (2013). Transformation leadership: When is it redundant? Academy of Management Perspectives, 2013, Vol. 27, No. 2, see http://dx.doi.org/10.5465/amp.2013.0064 .
