Bottom-up Approach Towards Organizational Change
THE IDEA
According to Cable (2012), successful organizational changes are not large organizational changes. A more successful way of organizational change is to bring about small changes in human behavior. How does this work?
According to Cable, we need to establish small changes in each employee’s individual behavior so that all those individuals together act in new ways and realize organizational change that consumers can see and react on. In other words, successful changes are those with a bottom-up approach rather than a top-down approach.
CHALLENGES OF THIS IDEA
First of all, it is challenging to realize small changes into each individual’s behavior to leading to substantial and successful changes, as the diversity in today's workforce is large. And next to diversity, people are more critical, knowledgeable, skilled and aware about past, current and future processes mainly as a result of access to Internet and social media.
This poses a challenge for leaders to implement a different way of management. Instead of the leader creating a new idea and convincing the employees that the change is needed, ideas should come from the employees themselves. They best know the basic facts of the organization and the day-to-day operations of the organization. In this way, change comes from the bottom up.
DISCUSSION
What do you think about this bottom-up approach towards organizational change? Is it possible to bring about small changes in individual behavior that together add up to one coherent idea instead of leading to even more confusion? What possible advantages and benefits could such an approach have?
Source: Cable, D. M. (2012) “The New Path to Organizational Change” Business Strategy Review vol. 23 Iss. 3 pp. 45-47
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Adrian Groeneveld, Netherlands
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Conditions for Effecting Change via the Bottom-up Approach
I my opinion the bottom-up approach is still the one with the best chance of success, but a conditio... Sign up
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Martin Lekoski, Slovakia
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Bottom Up Approach and what Not
It depends. In Japan you have similar concept called the ringi system which uses the bottom-up appro... Sign up
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