CAT 2018 Reading Comprehension — Previous Year Question

Read the following passage and answer the questions that follow.

Since the collective culture of an organisation is an aggregate of what is common to all of its group and individual mindsets, organisation transformation entails changing the minds of hundreds or thousands of people. Consultants Lawson and Price, listed four conditions as essential for changing mindsets: the employees must believe in the overall purpose behind the change, reporting structures, operational processes and measurement procedures must be consistent with the behaviour that people are asked to embrace, employees need to be trained to adopt to new environment and apart from top management, 'role models' at every level also need to embrace the new dogma. Considering the difficulties in changing mindset of existing people, most Indian organisations have found it prudent to drop them under Voluntary Retirement Schemes (VRS) and recruit new people with positive attitude to change. But this cannot be a pattern to manage change, one day or other, existing people need to be retrained to manage change. Dwelling further on our reluctance to change, Foster and Kaplan referred to 'Cultural lock-in', the inability to change the corporate culture even in the face of clear market threats. The heart of the problem is the formation of hidden sets of rules or 'mental models', that once formed are extremely difficult to change. 'Mental models' are the core concepts of the corporation, the beliefs and assumption, the cause and effect relationships, the guidelines for interpreting language and signals, the stories repeated within the corporate walls. 'Mental models' are invisible in the corporation, they are neither explicit nor examined but they are pervasive. When well crafted, 'mental models' allow management to anticipate the future and solve problems. But once constructed, 'mental models' become self-reinforcing, self-sustaining and self-limiting.