Managing Change

1The Human Side of Workplaces and Organizations

The Hard and Soft Sides of an Organization

Every workplace and organization has an official hard side and an unofficial soft side. In organization psychology, this is referred to as the official and unofficial organization, or as the organization's hard and soft structures.

The hard side consists of things that are decided and stipulated, such as the organization's structure (departments and divisions), the company strategy and medium‐term business plan, the employee grade system, the personnel system, job descriptions, work procedures that have been compiled into manuals, IT systems, performance rewards, etc. These types of information can be found in documentation or looked up in the company intranet and are easily visible to everyone. They're written down, so as long as someone reads them, there won't be any big discrepancies in how people understand them. (Of course, it's possible that people will have different interpretations and attach different meanings to these.)

On the other hand, the soft side consists of what goes on in people's minds and their behaviors. These include communication conditions, decision‐making processes, trust, cooperation, competition, power balance and relationships, the state of leadership, sharing and instillment of goals and strategies, motivations and feelings, assumptions and preconceptions, ...