전향적 변화에서의 위기감 형성과정에 관한 연구 (Process of Building a Sense of Urgency for a Proactive Change)

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 한국전략경영학회
· 수록지 정보 : 전략경영연구 / 13권 / 2호 / 25 ~ 52페이지
· 저자명 : 한수진, 김언수, 김경은

초록

기존 조직 변화단계 연구들에서는 변화 과정에서의 위기감(sense of urgency) 형성은 조직원들의 변화 수용도(readiness)를 증가시키고, 저항을 감소시키게 하는 중요한 요인이라 하였다. 그러나 위기감의 중요성이 기존 연구들에 의하여 널리 인식된 것에 반하여, 관련연구는 매우 취약하며, 있다 할지라도 조직 내적 혹은 외적인 위기(crisis)가 존재한다는 것을 가정하고 있다. 따라서 본 연구에서는 “가시적인 위기가 없이 꾸준한 성과를 나타내고 있는 조직에서 성공적인 변화를 하기 위한 조건인 위기감을 어떠한 과정을 통하여 형성하는가?”라는 질문을 던졌다. 즉, 조직 변화 과정에서 조직 구성원들의 위기감 상승을 유발하기 위한 최고 경영자의 행위는 무엇이 있으며, 이에 따른 구성원들의 반응은 어떻게 나타나는가를 파악하고자 하였다.
본 논문에서는 전향적 변화(proactive change)에서의 위기감 형성 과정을 연구하고자, 타이어 산업 내에 있는 선발 기업의 변화과정을 심층적으로 분석하였다. 분석 결과 전향적 변화에서의 위기감 형성은 최고 경영자의 조직 수준 목표치(aspiration level)인 조직 목표 제시와 이를 전달하는 과정인 인비전닝(envisioning) 그리고 자원투자 패턴, 절차처리 패턴의 변화가 조직구성원들의 목표치 및 인지 맵(cognitive map)의 변화를 유발하며 이것이 결국 위기감을 형성하게 된다는 결론을 도출하였다.

영어초록

Change is vital to the survival of any organization. Consequently, organizations continuously change themselves to enhance their self-generative capability and performance. Many other scholars have examined relevant phases in organizational change, and they commonly insist that an organization needs to form a 'sense of urgency' to successfully unfold changes. This paper investigates the process of build a sense of urgency when there is no visible crisis such as drastic performance downturn or radical changes in technology. In this regard, this paper aims to answer the following questions. First, what processes should be managed to overcome resistances stemming from the organizational inertia and to build a sense of urgency at the initial stage of proactive change when there is no external and visible crisis? Second, at the initial stage of proactive change, by what criterion should the top management set the stretch goal for the change? Third, when top management takes actions to change an organization's routine, resource investment pattern, system or structure, how would this influence the individual employees?To lead a successful change, all members or an organization should move toward the directed course. This can be initiated by accepting the necessity of the change while resistance kept at minimum. Acceptance with little resistance becomes possible when a sense of urgency is established at the initial stage. However, if there is no negative feature that gives initiative to changes, and the organization is producing steady achievements, how is it possible to generate a sense of urgency resulting in proactive change?Regarding this question, some studies assert that the decision makers' cognitive schema, knowledge and understanding toward the environment can influence the strategy building and proactive change processes even without external crisis. When the decision makers are free from their organizational routines, they display deeper understanding toward problems of strategy, technology and functional features of the organizations that they work for, and they sense the necessity to change by reevaluating the external circumstances. To successfully execute the intended change, decision maker's perception toward the crisis should be internally shared to generate a sense of urgency at the initial stage of change. In so doing, decision makers have to consider the members' psychological and cognitive aspects at the same time. To accomplish this, top management should bring symbolic and visible changes to the organizational routines and the organization's goals. This paper connects the aspiration level, which is the individual's psychological anticipation to the organization's goal, with the envisioning as an antecedent variable. Another important variable is change in the cognitive map as a belief system. We argue that, in order for a sense of urgency to be established, both aspiration level and cognitive map of employees should be significantly changed simultaneously, which are influence by top management's envisioning and routine disruption.
This study examined the main causes that induce a sense of urgency and its developing processes when there is no external crisis employing the case study approach. This study executed interviews, surveys and relevant material research to examine why and how. The verification procedures included surveys on the degree of sense of urgency at the initial stage of proactive changes.
Following is a brief summary of the in-depth analysis of the results generated from this study.
First, fostering and envisioning an artificial crisis executed by a CEO and change of routine in order to remove inertia can build the sense of urgency that is a requisite for a successful proactive change.
Second, the factors affecting aspiration level of proactive change and reactive change is different from each other. Proactive change showed that envisioning would take into account present and future tendencies of the industry, the competitor's standard and the expectation level toward society rather than being concerned with past performance affected aspiration level in reactive change. Envisioning includes building a challenging vision and the active pursuit of that vision, and this induces drastic enhancement in the aspiration level.
Regarding the building of sense of urgency, it seems that the destruction of inertia-cognitive map comes before envisioning-aspiration level, but it should be considered that there is a limit in the study cases; there was no proactive change case only with inertia-cognitive map part. However, in spite of the limit of our study cases, the assumption underlying the study was that the level of acceptance of employees for the change may differ in envisioning-aspiration level and inertia-cognitive map, which may lead us to presume that it might be more difficult to accept inertia-cognitive map side.

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