Essentials of Organizational Behavior, 14/e

Creating a Culture for Change

We’ve considered how organizations can adapt to change. But recently, some OB scholars have focused on a more proactive approach—how organizations can embrace change by transforming their cultures. In this section, we review three approaches: managing paradox, stimulating an innovative culture, and creating a learning organization. We also address the issue of organizational change and stress.

Managing Paradox

Managers can learn a few lessons from paradox theory,32 which states the key paradox in management is that there is no final optimal status for an organization.33 In a paradox situation, we are required to balance tensions across various courses of action. There is a constant process of finding a balancing ...