Side Effects of Corporate Cultural Transformations

As organizational leaders undertake cultural transformations to make themselves more competitive, they engender complex responses by those who lead and experience them. Some are intended, others not, and the latter, the unanticipated side effects of cultural agendas, can undermine-even defeat-the intended change process. Drawing on their observations of a diverse array of companies and managers that have undergone cultural transformations, the authors identify four leading side effects: (a) ambivalent authority, manifest in such directives as "ordering" employees to become "empowered"; (b) polarized images, evident in rhetoric that casts all that is new as progressive and all that is old as regressive; (c) disappointment and blame, seen in finger-pointing up and down the management hierarchy for the inevitable setbacks that accompany change; and (d) behavioral inversion, displayed in empowerment slogans that mask a reassertion of hierarchy. Cultural transformations generate fewer unwanted side effects when top managers openly address them during the transformation process.