The Normative Re-Educative Strategy Essay

A change strategy is meant to achieve goals in order to achieve the goals, objectives. mission and vision of an organization. Chris Argyris noted, a healthy organization performs three core activities over time:

* Achieves its goals. * Maintains itself internally. * Adapts to its environment.

Chin and Benne describe three types of strategies for change: * The first type is empirical rational strategies, based on the assumptions that people are rational, will follow their rational self-interest, and will change if and when they come to realize change is advantageous to them.

* The second group of strategies is normative-re-educative strategies, based on the assumptions that norms form the basis for behavior, and change comes through re-education in which old norms are discarded and supplanted by new ones. * The third set of strategies is the power-coercive strategies, based on the assumption that change is compliance of those who have less power with the desires of those who have are power. Normative re-educative strategy

The normative re-educative strategy is a change strategy developed by Benne and Chin in 1976.

The normative re-educative strategy states that change in an organization will only occur once change occurs in the values, attitudes, skills and relationships of the employees or the followers. In order to accomplish this each entity or individual involved in the change process must participate in the working-out of the plans of change. Honesty and mutual collaboration are the hallmarks of this strategy.

This process of change is delayed whenever a conflict arises. The normative re-educative approach will be used to bridge the theory/practice gap and promote self-awareness during this phase (education programmes for midwives). This approach reflects teamwork and anyone who attempts it alone will be beaten by the system. This approach is based on the belief that people need to be involved, to have ownership, to participate in all aspects of change that affects them because they will accept and implement only the changes that fit into their particular culture. The normative re-educative strategy assumes people are rationally minded and need to adapt to the process of change. This involves honest dialog and communication between the leaders and the followers.

Spietzer and Brown believe that this is the most effective strategy as compared to empirical-rational and power-coercive strategies because it is more likely to achieve adaptive changes and reach win-win solutions in the organization. However, Spietzer and Brown think that this model is still not comprehensive enough as it only attempts to change the behavior of the followers and does not focus on leaders changing themselves in order to initiate the change process. For that matter Spietzer and Brown proposed that Advanced Change Theory (ACT) is more suitable as also focuses on the leaders changing themselves leaders changing themselves in order to influence the followers or employees.

Advantages: * It provides opportunity to bring change in the loopholes areas of an organization by determining the basic root cause that occurs in the norms. * In case of unethical norms this strategy can be very beneficial. * The main focus of this strategy is towards culture, norms and relationship which are considered three significant factors for any organization. * Change strategy also focuses on culture which depicts that what people believe and want to do further which can create opportunities for them in the future. * Normative re- educative strategy of change usually focuses on long term goals.

Disadvantages: * Ordinary culture cannot be changed quickly or overnight. * Moreover, an organization’s culture is as much as the grip of informal as well as formal organization therefore this strategy can work only when relationship between formal and informal organization are at least cordial and hopefully harmonious.