DDBA 8521 Week 11 Change Ordering Seminar Paper Example

The Measures Move First: A Seminar Paper Arguing That a Software Support Organization's Measurement System Must Change Before Its Identity or Authority Can, Defending That Order Against a Culture-First Rival and Marking Where the Literature Ends

Student Name

Walden University

DDBA 8521: Seminar in Change Management

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

The Measures Move First: A Seminar Paper Arguing That a Software Support Organization's Measurement System Must Change Before Its Identity or Authority Can, Defending That Order Against a Culture-First Rival and Marking Where the Literature Ends

The Question and the Claim

Every diagnosis in this seminar pointed at several features of an organization at once: how work is measured, what members believe the organization is and who holds authority over decisions. This paper returns to the software support organization analyzed in Week 4, a team of 46 engineers whose vice president told them to fix root causes rather than close tickets quickly while their reviews still rewarded speed. It argues that in this organization, the measurement system must change before identity or authority can, and it ranks the three features in that order.

The Three Features in the Case

Measurement: engineers are reviewed quarterly on tickets closed per hour and satisfaction scores on closed tickets. Bonuses and promotion depend on both.

Identity: engineers describe their team as "the people who get customers unstuck fast." Speed is part of how they see themselves, reinforced by years of rankings posted on a team dashboard.

Authority: the vice president can issue directives about how engineers should work, but human resources controls the review criteria and revises them annually, and fixes to root causes must be accepted by a separate engineering team that sets its own priorities.

The Argument for Measurement First

Kerr (1975) showed that people do what organizations reward rather than what they ask for. In Week 4, engineers agreed with the directive and did not follow it, because following it would cost them. That evidence suggests the measures are the binding constraint: as long as they reward speed, no change in identity or authority can show up in behavior.

The measures also hold the identity in place. The belief that the team is defined by speed is not only a cultural inheritance; it is reinforced every quarter by rankings on closure rates. Gioia et al. (2000) argued that organizational identity is more fluid than it appears and can shift when members reinterpret what is central to them. That kind of reinterpretation requires something to reinterpret: evidence that a different kind of work is valued. Measures that count recurring problems solved would supply it. Changing identity first, by announcing a new team purpose, would ask engineers to adopt a self-image that every review contradicts.

Authority comes last because authority problems here are about the flow of work to the engineering team, which only becomes visible once engineers start referring root causes in numbers. With referrals at 6 percent of tickets, the engineering team has not had to make room for them. If measures move and referrals rise, the authority question, who decides which root causes get fixed, becomes urgent and concrete.

The Rival: Culture First

The strongest rival holds that change should begin with identity and shared vision. Kotter (1996) placed creating and communicating a vision near the start of his model, and many practitioners argue that people will not accept new measures until they understand and believe in the change. On this view, changing measures first would feel imposed and invite gaming, and the right sequence is to build commitment to root-cause work before rewarding it.

Why the Rival Fits This Case Less Well

The rival assumes that engineers lack commitment to root-cause work. The Week 4 interviews suggest the opposite: engineers already wanted to fix root causes and said so. What they lacked was permission in the form that matters, their reviews. A vision campaign would tell engineers what they already believe while leaving the measures that block them in place. Meyer and Rowan (1977) described how organizations can adopt formal commitments that remain decoupled from actual practice; a culture-first sequence here risks producing exactly that, a team that endorses root-cause work in meetings and closes tickets fast in practice.

Where the Literature Ends and My Argument Begins

The literature supports two claims: that rewards shape behavior more than requests (Kerr, 1975) and that identity can shift when members reinterpret what is central (Gioia et al., 2000). The ordering, measures before identity before authority, is my argument, built from this case. The literature does not establish that measures should come first in general; in an organization where people do not yet value the new work, the culture-first rival might be right. Weick and Quinn (1999) argued that the appropriate approach to change depends on whether change is episodic or continuous, and my ordering is offered for this kind of case, where people already favor the change and the system blocks it.

Implications

The vice president should negotiate with human resources to change review criteria mid-year, adding recurrence of problems and accepted root-cause referrals, before launching any new statement of team purpose. Once referrals rise, the organization should settle who decides engineering priorities for root-cause fixes.

References

Gioia, D. A., Schultz, M., & Corley, K. G. (2000). Organizational identity, image, and adaptive instability. Academy of Management Review, 25(1), 63-81. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2000.2791603

Kerr, S. (1975). On the folly of rewarding A, while hoping for B. Academy of Management Journal, 18(4), 769-783. https://doi.org/10.2307/255378

Kotter, J. P. (1996). Leading change. Harvard Business School Press.

Meyer, J. W., & Rowan, B. (1977). Institutionalized organizations: Formal structure as myth and ceremony. American Journal of Sociology, 83(2), 340-363. https://doi.org/10.1086/226550

Weick, K. E., & Quinn, R. E. (1999). Organizational change and development. Annual Review of Psychology, 50(1), 361-386. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.50.1.361