Stephen Billing’s Blog

Alvesson and Sveningsson’s useful potted summary of group dynamics thinking illuminates the roots of assumptions we now take for granted in working with change.

Group Dynamics in Organisations

The Group Dynamics school in the 1950s targeted change at the group level as leading thinkers realised that most people in organisations work in smaller work groups. They assumed that individual behaviour was governed by group norms, roles and values.

Kurt Lewin was a leading proponent and his three step model of unfreezing, change and refreezing is a well known classic approach. Unfreezing is about destabilising the status quo or group norms and values through means such as inspiring talk, education or projects to convince people of the necessity of the change. The second stage is making the change to move towards the desired state. The third stage is to stabilise the new state and prevent it from regressing back to the old state. The idea is to reduce the barriers to change rather than increasing the forces in favour of change, through knowledge, learning and commitment.

Organisations are taken to be in equilibrium of forces for change and forces for stabilisation. A common technique is to analyse the forces for and against change, mapping them to show this equilibrium graphically.

This approach gives rise to the classic cascade where the desired change is determined by top managers and is then rolled out through the hierarchical levels of the organisation. The following values underpin this approach, according to Alvesson and Sveningsson:

1. Empowering employee to act.
2. Creating openness in communications.
3. Facilitating ownership of the change process and its outcomes.
4. Promoting a culture of collaboration.
5. Promoting continuous learning.

These will all sound very familiar to any of you who have dealt with consultants or HR people in change projects. No doubt these will also reflect some of your own principles, which shows how ingrained these values have become in managerial and organisational change work.

This group dynamics way of thinking started off originally focused on work-group level evolutionary change and has developed more into organisation-wide approaches and towards cultural, strategic and revolutionary change, which has made it more similar to the Open Systems school, covered in the next post.