Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
Managing Change and Innovation - Coggle Diagram
Managing Change
and Innovation
What causes stress?
Stress can be caused by personal factors and by job-related factors called stressors.
Change of any kind has the potential to cause stress, because it can involve constraints, demands, and opportunities.
Five categories of organizational stressors:
Task demands
Role demands
Interpersonal demands
Organizational structure
Organizational leadership
Task demands
are factors relating to an employee’s job.
They include: the design of a person’s job, working conditions, and the physical work layout. Work quotas can put pressure on employees, especially if they are seen as excessive. In addition, the more interdependence between an employee’s tasks and the tasks of others, the more potential stress exists.
Role demands
relate to pressures placed on an employee as a function of the particular role he or she plays in an organization.
Role conflicts create expectations that may be hard to reconcile or satisfy. Role overload is experienced when the employee is expected to do more than time permits. Role ambiguity is created when role expectations are not clearly understood and the employee is not sure what he or she is to do.
Interpersonal demands
are pressures created by other employees.
Lack of a social support from colleagues and poor interpersonal relationships can cause considerable stress, especially among employees with a high social need.
Organizational structure
can create stress.
Excessive rules and an employee’s lack of opportunity to participate in decisions that affect him or her are examples of structural variables that might be potential sources of stress.
Organizational leadership
represents the supervisory style of the organizations’ managers.
Some managers create a culture characterized by tension, fear, and anxiety. They establish unrealistic pressures to perform in the short run, impose excessively tight controls, and routinely fire employees who don’t measure up. This style of leadership flows down through the organization and affects all employees.
How can stress be reduced?
Not all stress is dysfunctional. A little can be good in motivating employees to do a good job. However, too much is a bad thing.
Through controlling certain organizational factors, job related stress and other types can be reduced and prevent bad effects on work performance.
Things that a manager can do in terms of job-related factors begin with employee selection. Managers need to make sure that an employee’s abilities match the job requirements.
When employees are in over their heads, their stress levels usually will be quite high. A realistic job preview during the selection process can minimize stress by reducing ambiguity over job expectations.
If stress can be traced to boredom or work overload, jobs should be redesigned to increase challenge or to reduce the work overload.
Redesigns that increase opportunities for employees to participate in decisions and to gain social support also have been found to lessen stress.
If the employee stress comes from personal problems outside of work, managers are faced with two problems.
Managers are powerless to control the situation directly.
Ethical considerations exist: does the manager have the right to intrude?
Many organizations offer
employee assistance programs
and
wellness programs
to help reduce stress that comes from outside work.
Assistance programs often deal with such matters as financial planning, legal matters, health, physical fitness, and stress.
Innovation
How can managers encourage innovation in an organization?
Success today for most organizations, especially businesses, demands innovation! Therefore, knowing how to encourage innovation has become an important skill for managers.
Creativity often is an important element in innovation.
How are creativity and innovation related?
Creativity refers to the ability to combine ideas in a unique way or to make unusual associations between ideas. A creative organization develops unique ways of working or novel solutions to problems.
Creativity though is not enough.
The outcomes of the creative process need to be turned into useful products or work methods.
This is defined as innovation.
The innovative organization is characterized by its ability to
channel creativity into useful outcomes.
When managers talk about changing an organization to make it more creative, they usually mean they want to stimulate and nurture innovation.
What is involved in innovation?
Some people believe that creativity is inborn, while others believe people can be trained to become creative. The latter group of people see creativity as a fourfold process, consisting of:
Perception
Incubation
Inspiration
Innovation
Perception
involves the way you see things. Being creative means seeing things from a unique perspective. One person may see solutions to a problem that others can not or will not see at all.
The movement from perception to reality, though, is not an instantaneous process. Sometimes these solutions must go through an
incubation
period – a period of time for ideas from perception to swirl around in one’s brain and for collecting more data in order to change the idea into reality. This period may be short or long.
Inspiration
is when “how the idea finally can be converted into reality” pops into the brain. Inspiration is the moment when all of the efforts successfully come together.
Innovation
involves taking that inspiration and turning it into a useful product, service, or way of doing things. It is usually at this stage that the individual involves others in what he or she has been working on.
Innovation
How can a manager foster innovation?
The systems model (inputs => transformation process => outputs) can help us understand how organizations become more innovative.
If an organization wants innovative products and work methods (outputs), it has to take its inputs and transform them into outputs.
The inputs include creative people and groups within an organization. The transformation process requires having the right environment to turn those inputs into innovative products or work methods.
The right environment includes three variables:
Organization’s structure
Organization’s culture
Human resource practices
Innovation Variables: Structure
Organic structures,
Abundant resources,
High inter-unit communications,
Minimal time pressure,
Work and non-work support.
Innovation Variables: Culture
Acceptance of ambiguity,
Tolerance of the impractical,
Low external controls,
Tolerance of risks,
Tolerance of conflict,
Focus on ends,
Open-system focus,
Positive feedback.
Innovation Variables: Human Resources
High commitment to training and development
High job security
Encourage people to be idea champions
Creative people
Having any or all of the innovation variables in an organization’s environment can help foster innovation by an organization, but there is no guarantee.
Along with the right environment, good managers are essential too. Without them directing this potential innovation creation energy, an organization still might not be able to achieve good and usable results.