With over 30 years of experience at Honeywell, Michael
Bonsignore seemed to clearly understand the organizations values and its change
of times of where the company was, where it is now and where it is currently
going. Bonsignore’s challenge with the merge of Honeywell and Allied Signal was
to take two organizations that had different company cultures and ensure that
they were able to effectively merge into one successful cohesive business.
Bonsignore needed to concentrate on the organizations reinvention ensuring that
all members of the organization were able to fully understand the
organizational change that would be taking place and the change strategies that
would be implemented over time to maintain the company’s profitability, and
growth in the years to come.
When Bonsignore
states that he will reward people that look for best practices from both
companies in creating a new corporate culture and punish those who do not, I believe
he is referring to the difficulties he may experience with some employee’s
resistance to change. When there is change in any organization it can be
difficult for upper level management to receive approval from workers who are
uncomfortable with the change, or who are not in agreement with it. “On a
personal level, change represents the alteration of a set of patterns of
behavior, defines relationships with others, work procedures and job skills. On
an organizational level change means that policies, procedures, sunk costs,
organization structures, manufacturing processes and workflows will no longer
be the same” (Brown, Pg 144, 2011).
The barriers to Honeywell’s success proved to be
issues with the length of time the organization has been around which seemed to
have led to some complacency and fear of the unknown. The organizations past
success had been taken for granted and therefore needed a revamping of its new
organizational structure. In order to continue to be successful Honeywell
concentrated on three main factors; the delighted customer, profitable growth
and leadership and control. However, it was imperative that they were also
aware of those who were resistant to the changes that were being implemented
and took care on the steps they would need to take of this would somehow affect
their growth and productivity.
With the merge of Allied Signal and Honeywell, I
believe that Bonsignore did his best to create a culture where his employees
could be accepting of the change and understanding of the new goals of the
organization. I believe that he created an expectation of his organization where
those who showed they were flexible and adaptable would be awarded for their
good faith in the organization and would show those who were resistant to
change, that behaviors as such would be unacceptable to the new culture of the
organization. Therefore, in order to ensure their success, Honeywell made their
workers aware of their cultural expectations and compensated those
who were able to meet those goals of cultural productivity.
Honeywell is
currently a Fortune 100 company and has proven to be extremely successful over
the years. I believe that as long as the organization continues to strive for
product and consumer excellence they should remain a competitor in their respective
market. I do feel as though the company culture of any organization is
something that will always need to be worked on as times change however, as
long as Honeywell continues to make its employees just as important as their consumers,
much like Southwest has, I believe they will experience minimum difficulties in
resistance to change that may occur in the future.
In order for any
organization to be successful, a number of factors should be taken into
consideration which include a global strategic mission and vision that members
of the organization can respect. In the past Honeywell had been overly
ambitious with their goals and underestimated the task of combining the two
merging organizations leading to a demise in organizational productivity, profitability
and growth. With this in mind, Honeywell should keep in mind that an
organizational culture starts from the top.
Communication is the key to any organizations
success as it allows for an open door to collaboration. Bonsignore states that
employees want the unvarnished truth about their organizations situation, so
they are better prepared for the issues they may face. He goes on to state that
employees are “happy to deal with hardship as long as
there is a light at the end of the tunnel and that management is being real
with them” (Bonsignore, Films on Demand), therefore in order to build a
successful company, leadership should continue to take into consideration the
driving forces toward acceptance of a change program by employees and work on impacting
the organizational culture in positive ways. In order for Honeywell to be
successful, he must ensure that the leadership team of Honeywell, for the
present and future, are aware of the lifecycle of resistance to change and can
identify when they have encountered a certain degree of resistance that may affect
the organizations success in a negative manner. They must promote advocacy of
change and motivate employees by promoting positive momentums toward change
programs.
This exercise has
taught me that change programs are taking place in all organizations, all of
the time, including my own and that no matter the size of the organization,
resistance to change is inevitable. I have learned that while there are basic strategies
to change, the frameworks of change all coexist with one another creating
intervention techniques that are dependent upon the interdependencies of an
organizations sub elements as well as its cohesiveness with one another.
Lastly, I learned that selection of the correct OD intervention strategy is
imperative to an organizations success as it calls for specific behavioral,
structural and technological system integration.
References
Brown, D. R. (2011). An experiential approach to
organization development(8th ed.). Upper
Saddle River, NJ:
Prentice Hall
Films On Demand (2011, June 1). Mastering the Art of Corporate
Reinvention [Video file].
Retrieved from
http://digital.films.com/play/GWEU7L
