Detecting the Experts’ Mental Patterns towards Readiness for Change in Mashhad Municipality

Today, change is an important factor for organizations’ survival, and as the main factor for the success of organizational change, managers and experts must be able to implement change programs. It seems that change management skills including understanding, planning, implementing, and stabilizing change can affect attitudes toward change. Thus, employees' attitudes and mental patterns have been always considered as a fundamental factor in the literature on change readiness. As big organizations, municipalities have a large number of managers, employees, and clients and provide a variety of services. Therefore, it is necessary to review and correct their employees’ mental patterns. Accordingly, this study is aimed to recognize and compare the mental patterns of employees of Mashhad Municipality towards readiness for change from the managers' and experts' points of view.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK:

The concept of the mental model is not something that has recently been discovered but can be attributed to Kenneth Crick (1943). A person’s mental model is a framework of images and attitudes that limits their field of thought and action. Some scientists consider mental models as the cornerstone of knowledge building, including the main cognitive processes of change and learning. According to Levin (1947), change is to move from a steady-state to a new better state, through a pre-made plan or a set of predicted actions and steps. Many researchers have defined various dimensions of readiness for change. In this regard, Weiss (2002) suggests cognitive and emotional components for general judgments or the same attitude. On this basis, the current research considered these two dimensions as fundamental for studying the employees’ mental patterns.

The current research is a practical study in terms of purpose; it is a descriptive study in terms of method; and in terms of approach, it is a mixed-methods study of having inductive-deductive reasoning. The strategy of the current study is the Q technique.

The seven steps of the Q method were performed and reached the following results. The prevailing mental pattern of "capacity building" of managers was interpreted i.e., both the individual and the organization must have the capacity to implement changes. The most important mental model is that the effectiveness of change is a function of cognitive evaluation of organization members from four determinants of executive capacity, including individual capacities, perception of resources, situational factors, and supportive structures.

Research findings indicated that the mindset of managers and experts is mainly cognitive and composed of 11 dominant mental patterns. By comparing several similar mental patterns between managers and experts, we can talk about the supportive mental model of managers and the mental model of supportive experts, the committed mental model of managers and the mental model of committed experts, the confident mental model of managers, and the confident mental model of experts. There is a common mentality between these two groups of human resources of Mashhad Municipality. Also, the two mental patterns of followers and expert liaisons show the high importance of social relationships and processes in the process of change and the high influence of others’ behavior and decision when facing the change.