To Change Company Practice, Argue in Language of Target Group

When it is time to sell a change in your company, know the culture of your organization, especially of the group you need to impress, and tailor your argument in the language and metrics of your target group so your message will resonate.

So says Jennifer Howard-Grenville, a University of Oregon management professor in the Lundquist College of Business, in a paper published in the July-August issue of the journal Organization Science and in her newly published book Corporate Culture and Environmental Practice: Making Change at a High-Technology Manufacturer.

Both are based on an analysis of data gathered in a nine-month, in-depth study of a manufacturing company while she was a doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Based in a group formed to help the company reduce its detrimental environmental impact, she observed the group’s interactions with members of a larger, dominant technology-development group.

While the groups worked differently, the environmental group gradually began to influence how the core group designed certain new processes with environmental impact in mind. The company, fictitiously named Chipco in the study, is a major U.S. semiconductor manufacturer.

Howard-Grenville’s research provides a broad look at the tug of war that goes on within businesses to advance certain causes, be they those that affect the manufacturing of new products, increasing market share or responding to external social and environmental pressures.

Her study focused on the environmental group’s actions. Howard-Grenville also conducted 26 interviews with employees involved in earlier issue-selling efforts, both successful and unsuccessful, studied the company’s culture and poured through archival records of such projects done in the previous six years.

Research in the last 20 years had been based on interviews with successful issue sellers, focusing solely on what they did right, she said. “The studies hadn’t given the arguments much context,” she says. “Failures often were overlooked.

"I found that people who are looking to advance issues in an organization can do so by learning from failures of past efforts and of running up against core organizational culture,” she says. “If group members learn from earlier experiences, they’ll realize how to better craft their argument and portray an issue so that others in the dominant culture will understand what’s at stake.”

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