Regarding Institutionalizing - Essay Example

Kotters eighth point regarding alizing new approaches s that change sticks when it seeps into the bloodstream of the corporate body. New behaviors will be subject to degradations as soon as the pressure for change is removed (Kotter, 1995). To prevent this, these new behaviors have to be deeply rooted in social norms and shared values of the changed organization and that is why these new approaches need to be institutionalized. Beer, Eisenstat and Spector (1990) support Kotter’s thinking.

They argue that there comes a point when change has to be institutionalized so that the new approaches continue beyond the life of the manager leading the change and/or the team involved in implementing the change. To change an entire corporation, the six-step process proposed by Beer et al. (1990) has to be applied several times within the different plants, departments and divisions. This can only be achieved if the employees are helped to make the connections between the new approaches and behaviors and how they have helped to improve the outcome.

Furthermore, one of the core aims of instituting change is to create a learning organization in which case one would expect that people will be moved from one business unit to another depending on their different competencies and capabilities to adopt change. This implies that at any one point there will be new sets of new set of leaders and employees who will be required to embody the new ways. This next generation of enterprise leaders and employees will need to find that “the way we do things around” has been embodied through formal policies, systems and structures.

ReferencesBeer, M., Eisenstat, R. A., & Spector, B. (1990). Why Change Programs Don’t Produce Change. Harvard Business Review, (November - December).Kotter, J. (1995). Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail. Harvard Business Review, (March - April).