Leadership and Human Resources

Sunflower Electric Power Corporation certainly had compelling circumstances that motivated management to pursue cultural change. Having recently undergone debt restructuring and charges of mismanagement and corruption, employee morale was at an all-time low. The major priority for the company was to completely change its corporation culture with a huge emphasis on interpersonal relationships.

The culture of Sunflower was a command-and-control culture characterized by authoritative and conservative leadership. This culture had encouraged turf wars among managers and had inhibited effective job performance. Sunflower's new CEO, Chris Hauck, undertook many initiatives to change the culture to a competence culture in which leadership is visionary, sets high standards and encourages people to achieved new heights.

Competence cultures, unlike command-and-control ones pursue excellence and innovation. However, resistance to change would make Sunflower's cultural evolution a challenging one. There are four basic reasons for resisting change (Greene, Adam and Ebert, 1995):...
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