Colleague Response

I am excited that you noticed the importance of small and incremental changes in an organization, especially because small strategic changes make room for more employee-level involvement (Madsen, 2008; Schecter, 2008; Senge et al., 1990). The healthcare industry centers upon impeccable service and enthusiastic efforts to continuously improve the customer experience. The Kaizen philosophy teaches that companies can achieve improvement by taking small steps toward organizational goals rather than drastic changes. The Kaizen philosophy is perfect for small, family-owned businesses because it allows them to continually improve standards without large monetary investments. Instead, Kaizen would eliminate waste and any extraneous activities which add cost without adding value (Spreitzer & Doneson, 2005). In my view, strategic planning and change management are futile without knowledge management tools. Personal mastery and shared vision have also proven to be useful in helping employees to feel empowered and engaged at every phase of a change initiative. In other words, people are driven by the feeling that they “own” a part of an organization's vision and that their own intrinsic goals are serviced by the whole. In effect, money is a small part of the mix which drives organizational satisfaction. Internal stakeholders like to have some part in driving change and like to feel that their input adds value. Along this path is a need to continually navigate and reduce the potential for conflict.

However, one must maintain a certain work behavior and certain processes to continually drive achievement. Impact measures the degree to which “strategic, administrative or operating outcomes” are influenced by the worker (Spreitzer & Doneson, 2005, p. 8). Research has found that the amount of impact individual workers have on the company culture provides a great deal of motivation whether or not their relative impact is compensated by monetary reward (Kirkman & Rosen, 1999; Senge, 1999).

References

Kirkman, B. L. & Rosen, B. (1999) Beyond self-management: The antecedents and consequences of team empowerment. Academy of Management Journal, 42(1): 58-74.

Madsen, S. R. (2008). Preparing faculty and staff for change. Academic Leadership: The Online Journal 6(1). Available at: http://www.academicleadership.org/emprical_research/246.shtml. [Accessed 07 September 2013].

Schechter, C. ( 2008). Organizational learning mechanisms: The meaning, measure, and implications for school improvement. Educational Administration Quarterly, 44(2), 155-186. Schein, E. H. (1992). Organizational culture and leadership (2nd ed.). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Senge, P. (1990). The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. New York: Doubleday/Currency.

Senge, P. M., Kleiner, A., Roberts, C., Ross, R. B., & Smith, B. J. (1994). Fifth Discipline Fieldbook. New York: Doubleday, p 235

Spreitzer, G. and Doneson, D. (2005). Musings on the past and future of employee empowerment. In Handbook of Organizational Development edited by T. Cummings. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, p 1-12.