Fight organizational change cynicism

Change is a good thing, well that’s what we think. When we change, we evolve, moving to the next level. But when change is done to us, this really can explode in your face.

Did you ever hear from OCC? No, it’s not a 70s rock band. It stands for Organizational Change Cynicism. What do we mean with Organizational Cynicism? The definition is: “a negative attitude toward one’s employing organization. . . . The core belief is that principles of honesty, fairness and sincerity are sacrificed to further the self-interests of the leadership, leading to actions based on hidden motives and deception” (Abraham, 2000, p. 269).

The problem with OCC is that it doesn’t even matter if your change is good for the employees or not. Each change will get criticized. And we already discovered that the reason a change succeeds, is because of the support base of your employees.

Cynicism toward organizational change consists of two elements: a view that change is futile (Reicher et al., 1997) and placement of blame for the failure of change programs on the facilitators of change - usually management. In such circumstances, management is regarded as “being unmotivated, incompetent or both” (Wanous et al., 2000).

And this is interesting. We can see that management is the real boogie man when change is initiated. And that is where we come in! This is why we say that we have to change bottom up, with small experiments: prototypes. To fight OCC, it’s starts with giving information to understand a change and in the end giving trust to do the employees to actually initiate the change themselves.