Why change programs don't produce change.

Faced with changing markets and tougher competition, more and more companies realize that to compete effectively they must transform how they function. But while senior managers understand the necessity of change, they often misunderstand what it takes to bring it about. They assume that corporate renewal is the product of company-wide change programs and that in order to transform employee behavior, they must alter a company's formal structure and systems. Both these assumptions are wrong, say these authors. Using examples drawn from their four-year study of organizational change at six large corporations, they argue that change programs are, in fact, the greatest obstacle to successful revitalization and that formal structures and systems are the last thing a company should change, not the first. The most successful change efforts begin at the periphery of a corporation, in a single plant or division. Such efforts are led by general managers, not the CEO or corporate staff people. And these general managers concentrate not on changing formal structures and systems but on creating ad hoc organizational arrangements to solve concrete business problems. This focuses energy for change on the work itself, not on abstractions such as "participation" or "culture." Once general managers understand the importance of this grass-roots approach to change, they don't have to wait for senior management to start a process of corporate renewal. The authors describe a six-step change process they call the "critical path."

Toward a differentiated view of burnout: personal and organizational mediators of job satisfaction and stress.

This study examined the relationships between the characteristics of the human service work environment, workers' attitudes towards their jobs, and their reported attitudes and behaviors towards clients. The sample consisted of 168 workers employed in a range of human service programs in the Northeast. Job-enriching characteristics were found to be related to workers' levels of job involvement, job satisfaction, and personal accomplishment, but had little relationship to reported levels of emotional exhaustion. Job stressors were clearly associated with higher levels of emotional exhaustion, but were not related to levels of work involvement or accomplishment. Feedback from clients was central to determining the amount of accomplishment workers felt and their commitment to clients. By contrast, feedback from staff strongly related to workers' job satisfaction. Finally, higher levels of involvement with clients were associated with decreased resistance to the stresses of human service work while general job involvement was associated with increased resistance to such stress.