The Key to Organizational Sustainability: Nurturing a Culture of Change

Abstract

Unless they are constructed for purely theoretical purposes, all human organizations exist in their own particular environments. Those environments are subject to change. Unless the organization accommodates the changing environment. The chances of it continuing to serve the needs of its stakeholders will diminish. At a certain point as the needs of the stakeholders of the organization will cease to be served and the organization will no longer be sustainable. When the organization ceases to be sustainable it will cease to exits in its present form. The problem of organizational sustainability has been intensively studied. The issue of organizational resistance to change has been historically approached from the perspective of militating organizational resistance to a particular change initiative. In this paper, the social and historical roots of resistance to change are explored, and a new strategy to accommodate organizational change is developed. That new strategy is to adopt and nurture a culture of change. The first step in creating an organizational culture of change is to make change an everyday expectation by adjusting the organizational structure to encourage the assumption of power, authority and creativity throughout the organization. The basic four structures of organization are surveyed, and the type of structure that has been found to be most accepting and supporting of change is the type that has come to be known as an adhocracy. © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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