Organizational Energy
Organizational energy is an understanding of the staff’s attitude and behaviour towards change. This includes the attitude of both senior leaders and team members.
Definition of Organizational Energy
The concept itself is based on academic research by Henley Business School. It is defined by Bernd Vogel as ‘the extent to which an organization (or division or team) has mobilized its emotional, cognitive and behaviour potential to pursue its goals.’
Organizational Energy is divided in to four states:
- Productive energy: highly involved, care about success and welcome change
- Comfortable energy: enjoy what they do, but do not prefer change
- Resigned energy: mentally withdrawn and do nothing more than what is necessary
- Corrosive energy: team members argue with each other and actively try to prevent changes from taking place
These terms refer to the collective status of energy within a team or for a whole organization, rather than individual energies. In some cases, one team may have productive energy and another team within the same organization may have corrosive energy.
Sources of Organizational Energy
There are four sources of organizational energy. They are sometimes known as the 4Cs.
- Connection: how people in the organization connect themselves to the organization’s goals
- Content: how people are satisfied with their work
- Context: how the organizational practices help people to carry out their work
- Climate: how organization is supportive towards enabling people to achieve their best
Organizational Energy and Portfolio Management
Organizational energy determines the success or failure of any organizational initiative. This is especially true for implementing project portfolio management in an organization, because it will affect everyone. Organizational energy determines how ready the entire organization is, for change. This is one of the portfolio principles. It is also the link between the two portfolio cycles.
Productive energy is necessary for portfolio implementation to be successful. This can be induced via:
- Commitment, communication, and involvement by senior managers
- Engagement of employees
- Effective governance
- Focus on collective success of the organization
While MoP doesn’t cover specific techniques of changing organizational energy to productive state, interested learners can visit Henley Business School website or refer to Fully Charged: How Great Leaders Boost Their Organization’s Energy and Ignite High Performance, by Heike Bruch and Bernd Vogel to learn more.
Written by Inham Hassen
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