Diagnóstico Socio-ambiental

Since the beginning of 2014, the oil-crisis has had a grand impact on Scanoil, which has forced the company to downsize many of their units, change their work routines, and as a result of this caused fewer projects and assignments. These consequences have led to insecurity, a cultural change and an uncertain future among employees in Scanoil. In this manner, employees and leaders will react differently to the changes, and how they decide to live with them. Higgs & Aitken (2012) presents a framework for key factors determining how people react to changes, cf. p.27. Leaders in Scanoil are suffering from both an in response experience of the changes, and in direction. The victimized role is concerned with resistance towards the change. In direction on the other hand, is related to transform others resistance to something positive. First of all, both leaders and employees experiences some sort of

48 resistance in relation to the change process, however, as a leader you also have to be in, “in direction-mode”, which means that even though leaders struggles with the fact that the changes are transforming the company, and there is nothing they can do about it, they still have to convince their employees that this process can be turned into something positive. In addition to the latter, they will not only have the responsibility of convincing that the changes will have positive outcomes, they must also be able to show how the outcomes are positive, in order to motivate their employees.

For example one can argue that employees in Scanoil are suffering from an “in response” source of changes. This means that resistance is build upon a “victimized role”, where employees look at their selves as victims. Erwin & Garman (2010) argues that how a person reacts to change depends in part of the person’s general confidence about coping with change successfully. This can be verified by one leader who argues “that the “older” generation might be more unsecure during a change process, than the “younger” generation”. This can be substantiated with an uncertainty with regards to futuristic possibilities. One can assume that continuously changes affects the “older” generation negatively due to an uncertainty with regards to finding other jobs in other industries, and at the same time, they can be threatened by the fact that the “younger” generation might handle the changes more rapidly. Thereby they might experience the changes as more radical, due to an uncertainty and a lower risk tolerance contra the “younger” ones. In this manner, leaders in Scanoil have been able to perform in the light of systemic leadership, which deals with these psychological and

emotional issues by providing a huge amount of their resources communicating and informing these employees.

As aforementioned, how a person reacts to changes, depends in part of the person’s general confidence. Thus, this confidence is affected by prior experience with change as well as by traits, such as self-confidence, risk tolerance, openness to new experiences, and internal locus of control orientation (Ibid.). Hence, the majority of the leaders I have been interviewing had been through several change-processes before, which enhances their skills in leading change. However, there are many leaders that have recently been promoted to “line leaders”, which means that many of them have never performed “leading change” before, and for them this process can be perceived as particularly challenging.

49 Furthermore, there are large gaps between how leaders in Scanoil have responded to the changes in their company. Leaders diverge in how they manage to involve others and how they look at the crisis as an opportunity or as a failure. One leader argued that the Norwegian work-culture resembles routines, and changes that flinch from those are catastrophic for them. Therefore it has been problematic that the change initiative has been a top-down approach, which means that every decision comes from above, and leaders have to adjust to these changes. Some leaders have felt that management has not been open in the process, and they have kept a lot of information for themselves. This contradicts with Kotter’s philosophy, where he emphasizes the need to communicate the vision and keep communication levels extremely high throughout the process (Cameron & Green, 2012).

Moreover, leaders differ in how they perform and lead, and some leaders have a more

demanding leadership-style than others, and therefore they have more trouble succeeding with the changes. Another leader argued that leaders differ depending on where you are in the company. For example some of the leaders have been through so many change processes before that they have an attitude towards the change like “this will pass through, we have been through changes before and everything went back to normal”. These types of attitudes makes it difficult to lead, in addition to actually motivating employees to do their jobs regardless of what is happening in the industry. Higgs & Aitken (2012) argues that leaders need to express a deeper understanding for their peers and connect with their motivational drivers, which engage hearts as well as minds. Hence, if leaders do not see the degree of severity, they are not particularly suited to lead their team during the transformation.

Furthermore, first-line leaders as aforementioned, which are “newly promoted” leaders, have not experienced leading during a change process before, and therefore they might have some difficulties knowing how to create engagement and ensure that they keep their peers up to date with regards to information, communication, trust etc. In this manner, it would have been beneficial for these leaders to go through workshops on leading change earlier in the process than what they actually experienced.

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