Degrees of Change: First Order & Second Order

Its normal for all the organization to have first order changes. We see people getting hired and fired every day. But my concern is that could this first order change with reference to the organization be a second order change for an individual? I would say yes of course. I have seen people going upside down because they lost their jobs or got laid off etc. But can companies avoid these first degree changes in the organizations to save employees from going through a second degree change? No, organizations are selfish when it comes to organizational interest. All what matter to the managers is the growth curve of the company or the dollars coming into the company's account. They don't care what goes in an employee's life but just to get more out of them, they are made feel like their existence counts for the company and if they would leave company wont remain the same etc. But once validated, they easily fire people and get rid of them. I just think its plain cruelty.

Change is Good?!?!?..

We have been hearing this phrase for a long time. But even in organizational terms most people support this claim. Bigger companies take huge decisions based on this fact and try to convince themselves and their customer to embrace this so that they can welcome upcoming product, changed services, or new styles to them. Has change always been good? Not really, few of us remember when Coca Cola came up with a sweeter version, resembling Pepsi. Did everyone like it? No. Most people wanted their own Coke back. There are many other examples of bringing change in the market. But then why really do organizations and everyone emphasize on change? Because without change we can never experience what we are already missing, and there are some good possibilities that if someone has already tested a changed product, service, or in that case anything new, and recommend that, then chances are that it might really be good. Hence at industry level, most of the time changes bring to us products or services that are new but are already being tested and most probably being favored by us. So in my opinion, yes, if brought after a certain consideration and research, Change is Good.

Conflict Styles: Compromise

Yes, I believe compromising has been the best options for me when it comes to conflict. I was working on this project where we had to migrate around one hundred reports from one version of software to another and we were having many issues in them. Some people were working towards coding, others worked on formatting and so on. Conflict came when we had to provide the final version of the reports and one team started to blame other that because of what they did reports were not coming out right. That was one tough situation. My approach was to just compromise with what this other team had said and agree to work together, showing them how I did what I did and make them changes in reports accordingly without messing the real outlook of the reports. I compromised with some of their approach and they did on some on mine, so that worked for both of us and problem got solved.

Stress, Burnout, and Support

I have been going through this a lot lately. Now a days when economy is going down, managers are announcing news of being laid off to people everyday. In this time of the year, when one is loaded with the work of three and still told that yes you are doing great and keep doing the good work; he does feel stressed. Why? Because in this situation people are showing him that they have expectations from him and he really needs to keep working this hard. This situation of working too hard to meet the expectations of higher people in the company is Burnout in my understanding. But if a worker is working real hard but still unable to make the managers happy, and when he hears that you can do better than this, then he really feels stressed. Carrying the huge load of tasks on his back, and still being unable to satisfy his managers.. This has been my case for past few weeks and when I got a little support from my peers that gave me some additional help, I felt kind of relaxed. Friends can always become a good holding hand..

Intergroup Conflict

Many times in the organizations conflicts occur among the people from the same group or team they work in. Why? Because as our textbook says that conflict occurs when many people try to reach a goal through different approaches. So now if my approach of attaining a given task is a bit different than my peer then we certainly are going to have a conflict. Usually in this case both of the parties feel that they are correct and their opinion should be given precedence and when one gets his or her opinion chosen, the other one feels not appreciated or in some situations degraded. This person might feel hurt and in other cases not even show interest in getting the job done to show others that the idea other person rose was not the best one and hence it failed in getting the job done. I have seen this many time in my life and a good lead usually try to keep his/her team members in sync without getting personal about any task and making everyone feel involved.

Resistance: Subtle Forms (Hidden Transcripts)

Many organizations when enforce rules against the will of employees face resistance. As mentioned in the book, resistance could be of many types, like strikes, walking out o meeting etc but what I find most interesting is the hidden resistance. One thing I have seen at many places is that people start stealing from the property of company, saying that company doesn't pay what they deserve and make them work a lot more than normal hours. I believe company owners should pay much importance to the matters when it comes to employee satisfaction. Of course, not to an extend that tilts the balance but to a level that is just enough for both employee and employer.

Organizational Control: Technical

As we all know that technology has provided us several new ways of organizational control and most of the job is done by high technology devices. But are the employees feeling comfortable in this environment? In my personal opinion, no. We all know that its natural not to be working every single second of your work. We all sometimes chat with colleagues, check our emails and even make a personal phone call to check on few things. But how would one feel knowing that his or her every move has been recorded? Of course not good at all. So in this case the employee will feel under pressure of being watched by the higher authorities and not be able to perform with ease and confidence. At my workplace most of the websites have been blocked as well to limit the people to use work related web-sites only. I think that is like telling the employees that we own you and in the time we pay you to work for us, you should be doing a single thing else.

For me personally it has been a cause of nervousness and stress so I can say that control should be there but to an appropriate level.