Assessing the Role of Collaboration in Facilitating Organizational Change.
Discussion – Collaboration and Organizational Change
The following exercise introduces you to how an organization\’s culture influences its ability to make desirable changes aligned to its mission, values, and strategies.
Complete the collaboration warm-up exercise, Assessing the Role of Collaboration in Facilitating Organizational Change. A transcript of this interactive exercise is also available. Consider what you learned in the experience and respond to the following in a minimum of 175 words: Be constructive and professional. What do you think the role of collaboration is in assessing organizational culture? How do you think collaboration can assist an organization to align its current organizational culture with one that will facilitate positive change? What do you think the role of collaboration is in initiating change? What are some of the strategies you could use to contribute to effective collaboration when initiating change? Describe a behavior you have expressed in the past that prevents effective collaboration. Explain how you could avoid repeating this behavior and identify a more effective one to replace it with.
Student Post
#2AB
Collaboration can get people on the same page to create a functional organizational culture. When upper management collaborates with middle, and lower rung employees it can lead to more cohesion in the workplace and thus a thriving environment for all parties involved. The upper management\’s ability to allow everyone to have a say, can lead to better motivated employees that want to see their vision succeed because they\’ve taken part in an ownership of the change.
In the initiating stages of change for organizational culture collaboration is critical so that everyone has a fair say in how the change should be implemented. However, clear communication is essential for the change to work. Without clear, substantial, and thorough communication the vision for change can get muddled which could potentially lead to confusion. This confusion then leads to unmotivated employees, and disenchantment leading the change to fail.
One aspect I\’ve needed to work on during communication is the listening step. I am usually first in line to pitch ideas on how to improve my organization, and enhance our goals. However, I haven\’t always listened clearly on how people want to implement them. It\’s something that I need to work on.
#3GR
Collaboration is a good indicator of organizational culture. Organizational culture is how we do things within the organization and the climate that arises from those decisions at a particular time according to NASA (2004, BST, Pg.6). Evaluating collaboration and how people work together is going to provide a good indication of how change will be received. If organizations can’t work together on projects, there is not much trust or respect within that organization.
The leader is going to create a vision for the future, in order to achieve that vision, there will be strategic planning and subsequent operations to make it happen. Collaboration is the vehicle to help the team achieve the goal. It can’t be expected for anyone to do all of this in a silo. The team must work together, find a way to achieve the goal, and execute it.
Collaboration is the main tool for initiating the change. The senior leadership team will post a vision and their teams will need to come together to create a plan and most likely back brief those leaders. Without collaboration their either won’t be a plan or it won’t be aligned to the different functional groups
The senior leaders could take the first steps to set up the collaborative environment. An example would be creating a brainstorming session with thought provoking questions meant to stimulate conversation. That would get the right people in the room talking, instead of leaving it to the functional groups to coordinate and lead themselves through the process.
Protective behaviors hinder collaboration. Anytime a group tries to hide or safeguard data. That behavior is a non-starter. It is going to lead to pitfalls in the planning process due to incomplete or incorrect facts and assumptions.
A better behavior would be to start with a SharePoint containing all the of the needed materials so that there is nothing to safeguard its already available.
References
BST. (2004, March). https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/57382main_culture_web.pdf
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