Organisational changes during the transition in Estonia: Major influencing behavioural factors

Abstract

In order to examine the relationship between organizational change and organizational learning the authors conducted interviews with managers in 137 Estonian companies concerning changes implemented and learning outcomes. According to this survey the relationship between organizational change and learning is seen differently in a country in transition. Introduction Learning, both institutional and individual, and the ensuing corporate changes are seen as the prerequisite for success and survival of organizations irrespective of their size and sector. The challenge for most organizations is to recognise and react to perceived environmental changes or enact such changes and responses. Such capacities for dealing with change are embedded in the knowledge base of an organization which represents its founding conditions and experiences, in other words its repertoire of recipes (Spender 1990). Corporate changes reflect, therefore, an organzation’s knowledge of itself – what it is, what it can do and what its desired ends are and its contexts (de Geus 1996). The relationship between organizational ‘change’ and ‘learning’ is central to this paper. Change is the outcome of learning in one sense and learning is a medium for change and its outcome in another sense. Various conceptualizations of learning and models of change developed in the West over the past decades have adopted these notions. Estonia has passed through its transition from being a part of the former Soviet Union with a centrally planned economy, to being a politically independent country with a free market economy. There is a major difference between these systems. In the socialist system the most important aim was to provide jobs for all, it did not matter what this person actually did or whether his/her output was needed at all. The governing systems had not regarded efficiency as the main purpose. However, efficiency in its Weberian sense has always been the primary objective of organizations in both private and public sectors in most Western capitalist democracies. To change people’s minds in relation to this particular objective was the most important thing to learn during the transition from a socialist regime to a capitalist one. In recent years the desire and thus the end for most Estonian companies has been to be able to operate successfully in such ‘free market’ conditions. To achieve such an end the companies have also realised that there is the need for ‘transformational change’, i.e. changes to their established approaches and thinking. Writings on the management of change have frequently indicated that the first step to achieving lasting organizational change is to deal with the resistance to

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