Constructivists approach towards management of change - Essay Example

“I can’t work with him. We have a personality clash!” Social constructionism is considered to be an ‘epistemology’ owing to its approach of knowledge. The philosophy of social constructionism accentuates on the communication among the people in a particular group. Basically, social constructionism is based on three main assumptions (Burr, 2003). The relational and the social constructionist perspective would be discussed in this paper in order to understand about personality clashes. These perspectives would be discussed so as to bring in clarity for the reason of professional effectiveness. The notion of ‘construct’ focuses on the structure of reality that is made. In other words, it can be said that people build up stories, theories and ideas in order to assist them in coping up with the real world. Furthermore, the knowledge possessed by people does not impartially mirror the outside reality. It is all the time shaped from one’s own insights, knowledge and principles. The notion of ‘social’, states that the structures which are concentrated on the surrounding world is possible to be developed only with the help of communication with others. Knowledge or experiences is said to subsist only in the instance when it is communicated with another individual. Constructs are communicated stories and these facilitate people to operate as a collective group (Burr, 2003). The notion of social constructionism stresses on the fact that these structures are practical and is bound to be helpful in the course of daily activities. This is the reason for taking these assumptions into account as conformities that are complied with in a particular community so as to make an inhabitable environment. Language is said to play a vital part in social constructionism. Knowledge, as previously mentioned is said to be an outcome of cooperation through communication and thus, language too is said to be a critical factor in social constructionism (Burr, 2003). Social constructionism is found to be quite helpful because it relates with the holistic and the methodical world outlook and provides a strong structure of reference to construct the surrounding world. This can be stated as the strength of this theory. It was further stated by Neimeyer (2000) and Botella & Herrero (2000) that an amalgamative connection between the approaches of social constructionism and cognitive constructionism could be termed as ‘relational constructivism’. The perception of Adlerian reverberates with the theory of social constructionism in relation to the socio-cultural sources for the growth of human psychology. Although it was agreed that humans lived in a world that has individuals or persons and which is socio-cultural but each and every person had a differentiating feature of personhood which is being obtain by every individual. The theory of relational constructionism defines the process undertaken which leads to effective and developmental social construction. A perspective in relation to the relational constructionist provides fresh and prosperous likelihoods for importance in the courses of relations as well as social communications. Relational constructionism facilitates an individual or a person to have a “participatory world view” and presumes the dominance of relations to be the source in which identities, intercultural relations, learning and communities, which are viewed as social structures, are constantly formed and altered. In case of relational constructionism, relating is not considered to be a personal action any more and no more condensed to be one-sided informal relations with comments. Being a perspective, it provides a more prosperous set of probabilities in regard to the way relating can be theorized. To add further, the principle of relational perspective is regarding what subsists or is present which is also referred as ontology. It is then linked with the way people recognizes it and makes it probable and helpful to inquire about the methodical suppositions of participants as well as the academic theorists and practitioners. From these details of the perspectives it can be said that social constructionist theory paves way for relational constructionist perspective. According to the customary view regarding personality it is stated that personality includes quite a number of attributes like shyness, kindness, attraction, etc. The difference in people is said to happen because of the reason that some people may have few of the attributes present in them strongly whereas, the others may have the other attributes strongly embedded in them. Thus, from a futuristic perspective it can be stated that personality remains constant to a great extent over time. Another perspective of understanding developed from this theory is that personality manipulates behaviour. The outlook of personality appears to be just a common sense which appears to develop sense regarding comprehending people in the regular course of life. However, this customary outlook in regard to personality has been confronted by the study of social constructionist theory. It was said that personality is a concept which is socially structured or constructed and it is also believed that attributes are not present in the inner essences in any way. It has been repeated by the social constructionists that as personality cannot be likely observed directly so, its subsistence needs to be deduced and it is done through behaviour. However, it should also be noted that an individual’s behaviour can at times appear quite dissimilar which can be due to the present situation. Personality clash may take place in-spite of the idea developed by social constructionists regarding personality being fixed, stable or real because of the presence of the various attributes involved with or included in personality. An individual might have a strong presence of few of the stated attributes in his/her personality which might create a difference with another individual. This is because the presence or influence of the attributes in the personality of an individual might be dissimilar from that possessed by another individual. This dissimilarity in personality attribute traits might give rise to a conflict between the two individual’s which can be termed as a personality clash. It has been already considered by the social constructionists that people are defined from their communications with others. According to them personality is deduced from the behaviours of individuals that engage actions which can only happen in regard to the responses made by others. In this regard it has also been believed by the social constructionists that individuals are resistant to changes because the core regulating courses of individuals are less available and adaptable to alterations. This can be considered as a vital limitation in the theory of social constructionism. According to Adlerian, individuals are considered to be communicating in a group but still they have diverse features present in them. This can be considered to be the cause behind clashes arising among individuals or personalities. Taking the various past literatures about managing changes into account, the social constructionists view that people resists changing because the changes are taken to be threatening the status quo. The resistance to change also occurs as the people consider changes to be threatening the ‘mode’ in which the world is considered by them. The people think that the changes would discard their values and beliefs that they possess for the entire world. They resist because they believe that implementation of the changes would call for justification from their part and hence would challenge their mode of rationality. While considering the various literatures on resistance to change as a whole, the literatures based on social constructionism consider the people within organisation to be holding the similar objectives in their lives and considering the same reality of the world. But the question that arises in this regard is if constructivist perspective is taken into consideration, what will be the consequences of this approach upon the people’s thinking towards resistance to change. Under the constructivist approach, the personality of the individual is considered to be affected by the constructed facts where they live. In this situation, as also mentioned earlier, different individuals holding different positions at different points of time exists in different realities within the world (Burr, 2003). It is because of this reason that at present, literatures depict that the fact of resistance exists within the reality in which the people work and not within the people’s personality traits. It is again a noteworthy fact that the various sets of constructed realities produce both different forms of outcomes as well as different personalities among the individuals. Hence, the individuals within the organisation possess different senses and the differences are depicted through words by the individuals. Due to the differences in the individuals’ senses, they engage themselves in different forms of activities. As a result of the individuals’ engagement in different activities, the nature of resistance also varies from one individual to the other. The resistances to change from the part of the individuals within an organisation depend upon the various forms of reality under which the individuals live (Burr, 2003). According to the constructivist approach towards managing change in an organisation, the resistance can actually be observed as an equation of various background conversations. The background conversations give rise to various realities for the individuals who participate within the realities. There is a specific consistency which is provided by the conversations that implies within each of the realities that prevails, every entity is properly placed. In the modern context of observing resistance to change from the constructivist perspective, it is essential that the conversations are comprehensively understood for managing the change. Essentially, there are three forms of background conversations that create the resistance to change among individuals: the complacent background, the resigned background and the cynical background (Hedberg and Et. Al., 1976). The complacent background gets constructed due to the successes being achieved by the organisation on a historical basis. The success of the organisation can be due to perseverance or innovation. The achievement of the success gives rise to the reality that the organisation had succeeded in the past through following certain norms and in the future also, it would succeed by following the same norm as in the past. In these types of organisations, the people prefer to proceed with the past views in order to provide justifications to their present success. The justification is that the organisation will continue to achieve success in the present and future through the past norms and beliefs (Hedberg and Et. Al., 1976). Henceforth, the complacent conversations reveal a phenomenon where the individuals within that reality believe that no new and innovative features are required for the organisation to survive and succeed in the future. The individuals under this hold the notion that the present things that are happening within the organisation are at their comfort level and they feel satisfied with the present things. Some of the words that are conversant with the individuals under this reality are “Why mess with success?” and “Don’t rock the boat” (Evans, 1988). Under this reality, any sort of effort from the management to bring about changes within the organisation is considered to be unnecessary by the individuals and threat to the success that can be achieved in the future. The resigned background is another conversant that designs resistance to change among the individuals within an organisation. Unlike the complacent background, this background is constructed on the basis of failure encountered by the organisation in the past. In normal parlance, it is the nature of the people not to blame themselves for any failure. But in the resigned background, the individuals within organisations prefer to blame either themselves or the organisation in which they operate for such occurrences. In this reality, the individuals hold the notion that they have failed because they are not lucky enough to succeed or do not possess the expertise and skills required for attaining success. Discussion among the individuals within the resigned background depicts their failure to try to succeed in the future and generates forms of ‘given up’ attitudes among the individuals. The sense of disparity, hopelessness, gloominess, sadness and depression are the common facts within this reality (Block, 1993). Any attempt of the management towards bringing about change in the resigned background reality generates half-attempted effort from the individuals and hence would not produce any fruitful results for the organisations. The truth about this reality is that the problem exists within the individuals and not within the external environment or reality. For managing change, the management would thus have to change the belief of the individuals (Block, 1993). Similar to the resigned background, the cynical background is also constructed due to the failures being experienced by the organisation in its past performances. However, the failures can be experienced either directly or through explicit experiences in the form of stories and descriptions of other individuals. The difference of cynical background with the resigned background is that in the latter no external reality is considered to be the reason for failure but in this case the external reality is held responsible for the failure. Nonetheless, the cynical background is also a pessimistic approach in which the hopes are aggravated and upset (Reichers and Et. Al., 1997). The literatures included within the section about the impact of constructivist’s approach towards management of change within the organisation depicted that the resistance to change initiations are provided by the above mentioned background conversations. The backgrounds are again constructed from the historical relations that are preserved through either success or failure came across in the past. Thus, if the management wants to control the resistance to change within the organisation, then the beliefs of the individuals as per the background conversations are required to be altered. References Block, P., 1993. Stewardship: Choosing Service over Self-Interest. Berrett-Koehler. Burr,V., 2003. Social Constructionism. Routledge Evans, H., 1988. The Great Procrastinators. US News & World Report; Vol.105, No 2. Hedberg, B. & Et. Al., 1976. Camping on Seesaws: Prescriptions for a Self-Designing Organisation. Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol.21, No. 1. Reichers, A. & Et. Al., 1997. Understanding and Managing Cynicism about Organisational Change. Academy of Management Executive, Vol.11, No. 1. Appendix Read More