Management and Change in Africa | Working With Africans

In the business literature, change management is a field of its own. In the reality, change managers and leaders often rely on their gut feelings and on their past success. Some get inspiration from the change management literature.

All too often the change literature draws on the premise that psychology is the main avenue to understand people?s attitude towards change. The same discipline is then used to devise how to effectively and efficientlly support the change process.

Interestingly, change management is very much influenced by the societal values of the place where change is brought about.

Psychologists themselves have admitted the limitation of their own field: more than two decades ago, Bruner, the father of cognitive psychology, acknowledged that culture appears as an equally valid explanation?for understanding people?s attitudes and reactions. Cultural psychology is a sub-discipline that looks at these cultural differences.

Unfortunately a number of change management experts have not updated their knowledge and continue to propose an approach to change that relies on universal human tendencies.

This makes it especially dangerous as more and more change is brought about globally. Transferring an effective change recipe in a different subsidiary or imposing a foreign partner to swiftly change may lead to unexpected and or undesired outcomes.

Reality shows that when some cultural specifics vary from the context where a successful change story has taken place, the effectiveness of the change tools and techniques might be drastically reduced.

Let us illustrate this:

Comparative anthropological research has proved that across societies people showed different attitudes towards change. In the Dutch business anthropologist G. Hoftstede ?s work, the parameter that is related to the attitude towards change is named ?uncertainty avoidance?.

It makes sense to believe that in a country that scores low on uncertainty avoidance, people have a tendency to faster accept change than in countries that scores high on the same parameter. There might be a number of reasons why people are comfortable or uncomfortable with the unknown that change brings about.

For example, people who believe that they have little impact on the outcome of their actions might not bother change as they may take it as destiny. In such case, there is no need to implement a sophisticated change management support as the stakeholders might accept change without any resistance.

However when this cultural specifics ?is associated with the reference to the Past as a model of action, change may be very deeply opposed to. In many African societies and organizations, people interpret attitudes, actions and reactions following a non-Western rationale: bad spirits or revenge from angry ancestors may cause people to act or react in a specific way.
Bringing about change not only challenges the model of reference but it also can be interpreted as an intention to hurt others. Asking someone to change an attitude or a practice can cause people to believe that the change agent is ill intentioned because under a bad spirit?s influence.

If we add to these two cultural parameters another one, the situation gets even more complex : in societies where the group is the reference for shaping the identity, there is a pressure towards social conformism: in other words, the whole group surrounding the change agent can pressure him/her not to implement the change. According to the weight of the cultural parameters, the change agent may or may not succeed.

Resisting the social pressure can cause social ostracism, which can be enough a reason to give up with any healthy change from an economical standpoint. Most African societies feature the group as the model for shaping the identity.

These few examples make it clear that change management cannot be delivered?in one recipe.

However with change management literature drawing so few case studies from African contexts, it is hard to challenge current change management techniques and tools.

Decades of cross-cultural co-operations in the fight against poverty have enabled researchers and practitioners to accumulate an enormous amount of information on cultural specifics of each African country. Yet little of that has been influencing management education in Africa. Most change literature locally available is Western-centric or imported.

If so many actors have gained some expertise in African cultural specifics, should we bother about the universal recipe proposed by the change management literature? Wouldn?t these people adapt the change recipe to the cultural specifics of their work setting?

That is far from being sure!

As a matter of fact, most African countries are new actors in the global economy. For very long they were conducting business and running organizations with a rationale that had nothing to do with that of the market economy.

With the influx of foreign direct investments, Africans are willing to fill the education gap: developing competences, skills and knowledge has become their priority to compete in the global economy. With no indigenous model of change being openly acknowledged, they entirely rely on foreign literature and on foreign models of references.

They often blindly take any foreign skills training programs proposed by local or foreign organizations. American training products are especially valued. Confronted with the challenge to implement these foreign recipe they find no other reason that their incompetence for explaining their failure. Yet admitting the failure openly would just challenge their status and therefore they rather keep quiet. Ineffective change approaches and techniques will continue to be taught and developed as long as culture will not take a bigger place into business and change management education.

Source: http://www.workingwithafricans.com/management-and-change-in-africa/

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