The KNUST Impasse: A Dictatorship Or Leadership And Management Failure In Resistance To Change?

Human change, whether at the individual or group level, is a profound psychological dynamic process that involved painful unlearning without loss of ego, identity and difficult relearning, as one cognitively attempts to restructure one's thoughts, perceptions, feelings, and attitudes (Schein 1995).

While changing the work values and culture of group or team can be a challenge, there is an established recognition of the importance of frameworks, interpretive models, systems and flexible methodologies in enabling groups, or specific teams, to identify common values and learn to handle challenges and work collaboratively and systematically to achieve a common goal (Checkland & Poulter, 2006).

The recent regrettable incident at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) has a perceptible likeness to a vicious demonstration which was staged at Prempeh College somewhere in 1982.

I recall a few months into my college life in 1982, the senior students who had the precedence in taking crucial decisions decided to organise a ferocious demonstration which caused a lot of havoc. Of course all the junior students had to join in as we had no choice abstaining.

The students became spiteful towards the authorities following irregular feeding at the dining hall. Take, for instance, the college authorities refused to feed us with the finest food such as bread and milk which had been supplied by the Ghana Education Service.

Amazingly, we were turned into vegetarians involuntarily, despite the stockpile of fish and meat. The students nonetheless had no option than to accuse the authorities of sharing the products among themselves.

The food storage, the premises of the Headmaster and the Matron were ransacked and wrecked. We took to the streets of Kumasi and presented a petition to our Patron, Asantehene Otumfo Nana Opoku Ware II of blessed memory, at the Manhyia Palace. We went back to the college, only to be sent home by the authorities.

We spent approximately one week at home. We were recalled back to college following the normalisation process.

Apparently, we got what we were asking for, as the Headmaster and the Matron were transferred to another institution. More importantly, the authorities began to feed us with the finest food. How wonderful that was.

In a way, the ferocious demonstration at Prempeh College some 36 years ago and the more recent KNUST students ‘infamous uprising’ were instigated by unpopular and somewhat autocratic decisions by the respective authorities.

We can, therefore, emphasise that the otherwise avoidable truculent demonstration by the KNUST students was as result of an abject failure by the leadership and management.

Change, by definition, requires creating a new system, which in turn, requires effective team and leadership (Kotter 1990).

On the other hand, some experts contend that if change is a process of leading an organisation or a nation on a journey from its current state to a desired future state and handling all the problems that arise along the journey, then change concerns leadership as well as management (Gill 2003).

Leadership can be considered to be the personal qualities, behaviours, styles and decisions adopted by the leader. In other words, it concerns how the leader carries out his/her role. Hence while the role of leader can be described in a job description, leadership is not so easily pinned down (Waldman and Yammarino (1999).

Waldman and Yammarino observe that early investigations, which focused on the personal characteristics or the behaviours of individuals who emerge as leaders, were followed by those that considered the influence of situational factors of leadership behaviour.

Apparently, most recent research interest has centred on relationships between leaders and subordinates, with some experts on the topic stressing the need to study followership. This has been argued as important, not so much because all leaders are also followers, but also because modern notions of leadership place considerable emphasis on the power and importance of followers in ultimately legitimizing and enabling leadership.

Interestingly, Leadership, change and management scholars contend that transformational leaders act as role models, motivate, provide meaning, optimism, enthusiasm , strategic thinking and stimulate the intelligence of their subordinates(Bass, 1985).

Other experts, however, argue that although each leadership style has its own merits and de-merits, transformational leadership draws much attention since it contributes to firm innovation, organisational learning, and creativity skills (De Jong and Den Hartog, 2007).

Moreover, some scholars have examined transformational leadership in various disciplines (Yammarino and Bass 1990). Some experts, nonetheless, define transformational leadership in terms of idealized influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, and individual consideration (Nemanich and Keller, 2007).

Some experts explain the first component, idealized influence, as charisma (Schepers et al, 2005). And a few scholars mentioned the first two, idealized influence and inspirational motivation as charisma (Kark et al., 2003).

Thus, it has been argued that transformational leaders exhibit idealised influence and inspirational motivation in their quest to effect transformational change (Kark et al., 2003).

It should however be noted that idealised influence portrays leaders as most respectful, reliable and meritorious, and shows the characteristics of setting vision and articulating it to accomplish, and describes leaders’ risk sharing with their followers in line with ethical principles (Bass et al., 2003).

What is more, inspirational motivation explains how transformational leaders encourage their subordinates to strive towards achieving vision through creating individual and team spirit (Bass et al., 2003).

While the component, intellectual stimulation, explicates how transformational leaders promote their subordinates innovative and creative skills by solving problems entirely in new ways without criticizing them over mistakes (Bass et al., 2003).

According to Self and Schraeder (2009), the first step in the process of implementing a transformational change initiative is creating readiness for the change. They stressed further that the basic readiness lies in Lewin’s (1947) concept of unfreezing or getting organizational members to relinquish, both physically and psychologically, of the current ways of doing things within the organization.

Self and Schraeder maintained that the leadership must however endeavour to provide evidence that the current ways of doing things are Obsolescent before making the needed changes.

It would, however, appear that the leadership and management of KNUST readiness to embark on transformational change became questionable as they allegedly failed to manage the ensuing resistance to change.

Another approach to creating readiness (as well as managing the transformational change implementation process) was proposed by Doherty and Horn (2005).

Doherty and Horn propounded a number of methods for managing resistance to change, inter alia, education, communication, participation, involvement, facilitation and support.

While Schein (1995) building on Lewin’s force field analysis, emphasised that the stability of human behaviour is based on "quasi- stationary equilibriums" supported by a large force field of driving and restraining forces.

Schein noted that for transformational change to occur this force field has to be modified under complex psychological conditions because, as often noted, just adding a driving force toward transformational change spawns an immediate counterforce to maintain the equilibrium.

According to Schein, this observation explains the important insight that the equilibrium could more easily be moved if one could remove restraining forces, since usually there are already driving forces in the system.

Schein thus stressed further that restraining forces are difficult to reach, because they are often personal psychological defences or group norms embedded in the organisational culture.

In a nutshell, Kurt Lewin’s unfreeze phase in transformational change process is similitude to mountain climbing.

Needless to state that in mountain climbing, once the climbing team have been motivated and managed to get to the summit, there is another arduous task of negotiating a descent.

In effect, the changing/moving stage in transformational change process is basically to alter the behaviours of subordinates (Kotter (1996).

The stage preceding the ‘unfreeze and ‘moving phases in the change process is ‘refreeze phase. Refreezing is the final stage where new behaviour becomes habitual, which includes developing a new self-concept & identity and establishing new interpersonal relationships (Kotter, 1996).

In other words, this is the stage where the leader exhibits all his/her leadership qualities in the transformational change process.

Suffice it to stress that there is a growing consensus that successful implementation of transformational change requires an emphasis on both leadership (the social/emotional/relational aspects of change) and management (the technical/instrumental/task aspects of change) (Starke et al., 2011).

In a grand scheme of things, if the transformational change was to be successful, it will require a leader with effective transformational leadership skills (Gill 2003).

K. Badu, UK.