Why Problems Arise After the Chaffinch Group Takeover — CIPD 5CO01 AC 2.1 Answered
Why Trust This Assignment?
- AC 2.1The problems arising after Chaffinch Group's takeover of Calmere House are not failures of individual behaviour — they are the predictable structural outcomes of a collision between two incompatible organisational culture types.of the 5CO01 assessment requires students to use theories and models that examine organisational and human behaviour to explain why these problems have arisen. Handy (1993) provides the classification framework that identifies Calmere House as a Power culture entity and Chaffinch Group as a Role culture entity. Schein (1985) explains why the problems persist despite new procedures and systems being introduced. Lewin (1947) identifies the specific implementation failure that turned a predictable culture clash into sustained resistance.
- AC 2.2For full treatment of Lewin's three-stage model across other CIPD change management contexts, [Lewin's change model CIPD application](/lewin-change-model-cipd/) provides a broader methodological analysis. The voice and selection changes at Chaffinch that compound these culture problems are addressed in the [5CO01employee voice](/5co01-employee-voice-culture/) page.
The problems arising after Chaffinch Group’s takeover of Calmere House are not failures of individual behaviour — they are the predictable structural outcomes of a collision between two incompatible organisational culture types. AC 2.1 of the 5CO01 assessment requires students to use theories and models that examine organisational and human behaviour to explain why these problems have arisen. Handy (1993) provides the classification framework that identifies Calmere House as a Power culture entity and Chaffinch Group as a Role culture entity. Schein (1985) explains why the problems persist despite new procedures and systems being introduced. Lewin (1947) identifies the specific implementation failure that turned a predictable culture clash into sustained resistance.
Handy’s Culture Types — Identifying Calmere House and Chaffinch Group
Handy’s (1993) classification of four organisational culture types produces a framework for identifying the architectural basis of the culture problems at Calmere House after the Chaffinch acquisition. A CIPD 5CO01 assignment example that applies Handy to AC 2.1 must name all four culture types before narrowing to the two that apply — the CIPD marking rubric rewards breadth of theoretical knowledge before depth of application.
The four types are:
Power culture is represented by Handy as a spider web. Authority radiates from a central figure — the founder or owner — and all significant decisions flow through that centre. Speed and flexibility define Power culture organisations. Personal loyalty to the central figure takes precedence over adherence to formal rules or processes. Power cultures are resistant to procedure-based compliance because the relationship between the centre and the individual is the operating mechanism, not the written rule.
Role culture is represented as a Greek temple. Functional columns — HR, Finance, Operations, Care Management — support a formal hierarchy above. Authority derives from the role a person holds in that hierarchy, not from personal relationship or individual reputation. Behaviour is governed by formal rules, defined reporting lines, and documented processes. Role cultures are stable and scalable but slow to adapt, because change requires revising the formal structures that govern behaviour.
Task culture is represented as a matrix or net structure. Expert-driven and project-focused, task cultures form fluid teams around specific objectives and dissolve them once those objectives are met. Authority is distributed to whoever holds the relevant expertise.
Person culture describes a cluster of individual professionals who place their own expertise and autonomy above any organisational hierarchy. Professional service firms, partnerships, and academic departments often operate this way.
Why Calmere House Fits the Power Culture Type
Calmere House fits Handy’s Power culture type because Kirsten, the previous sole owner and manager, was the centre of the spider web. All authority radiated from her. Staff loyalty was directed at Kirsten personally, not at Calmere House as an organisation. Decisions were made informally and quickly — there were no structured performance management systems, no documented grievance procedures, no formal reporting lines that operated independently of Kirsten’s personal discretion. The 45-room care home functioned as an extension of Kirsten’s personal management philosophy, which prioritised relationships, trust, and flexibility over written process compliance.
When Kirsten left following the acquisition, she took the centre of the spider web with her. The Power culture depends entirely on the presence and accessibility of the central figure. Her departure did not simply create a management vacancy; it removed the operating mechanism that gave the organisation its coherence.
Why Chaffinch Group Fits the Role Culture Type
Chaffinch Group fits Handy’s Role culture type because its corporate governance structure derives authority from defined roles in the formal hierarchy rather than from personal relationships. Chaffinch introduced standardised care procedures applicable across all its acquired homes. Formal performance management systems, structured HR processes, and corporate reporting lines were imposed on Calmere after acquisition. These are the functional columns of the Role culture temple: they define what each person’s role requires, what standard performance looks like, and how non-compliance is addressed. Role culture is the organisational architecture of companies designed for scale, regulatory compliance, and consistency of output across multiple sites.
The Culture Clash — What Happens When Power Culture Meets Role Culture
When a Power culture organisation is absorbed into a Role culture system, Handy’s (1993) framework produces a predictable set of resistance responses that are structural outcomes, not individual failures. This is analytically critical for AC 2.1: the problems at Calmere are not because Calmere staff are resistant personalities or poor performers. They are because the two organisational architectures are fundamentally incompatible.
Calmere staff under Chaffinch’s Role culture management experience a specific set of losses. Direct access to the decision-maker is gone: under Kirsten, a care worker could raise a concern and receive an immediate personal response. Under Chaffinch’s hierarchy, concerns enter a formal process that may take days or weeks to resolve, and the person making the decision is unknown, physically remote, and has no personal relationship with the staff member raising the concern.
Personal identity in work is disrupted. Power culture staff built their professional identity on the quality of their personal relationships with Kirsten, with colleagues, and with residents. Chaffinch’s competency frameworks and performance metrics measure something different: procedural compliance, documentation accuracy, adherence to standardised care protocols. These measurement criteria do not capture the attributes that made a care worker valued under Kirsten’s management, which produces the sense among long-standing staff that their professional worth is being negated.
Informal norms are replaced by written rules. In the Power culture, the norm was to use personal judgement and consult Kirsten when uncertain. In the Role culture, the norm is to follow the written procedure and escalate to the line manager. This substitution of relationship with process is experienced by Power culture staff as depersonalisation of the care environment.
Handy’s framework predicts that these experiences produce: passive resistance to new procedures (complying minimally without investing discretionary effort), absenteeism as emotional disengagement translates to physical absence, reduced quality of resident interactions as relational investment declines, and stated intention to leave for an organisation where personal relationships remain the operating currency.
Schein’s Culture Model — Why Surface-Level Change Fails
Schein’s (1985) three-level culture model operates below the surface of what an organisation’s members can easily articulate, providing a mechanism to explain why Chaffinch’s procedural interventions did not resolve the resistance that Handy’s framework predicted. Handy’s culture types for CIPD provides broader coverage of the Power and Role culture distinctions across other CIPD application contexts.
Schein identifies three nested levels:
Artifacts are the visible, tangible elements of culture: the new Chaffinch branding on Calmere’s documents, new care record systems, restructured management titles, changed physical environment. These are the elements that any visitor would immediately observe as markers of the new ownership.
Espoused values are the stated beliefs — what the organisation publicly says it believes. Chaffinch’s espoused values emphasise quality through standardised process and measurable care outcomes. Calmere’s pre-acquisition espoused values emphasised quality through personal care relationships and Kirsten’s individualised management approach.
Basic assumptions are the deepest and most resistant level: unconscious, taken-for-granted beliefs that govern behaviour without being explicitly articulated. Those who hold basic assumptions cannot easily identify them precisely because they are treated as obvious rather than as beliefs.
Calmere staff’s basic assumptions include: “work is inherently personal”; “the quality of a care relationship is determined by the quality of the human relationship underlying it”; “loyalty to individuals defines commitment”; “process compliance is what you do when you don’t trust people.” These assumptions directly conflict with Chaffinch’s basic assumptions: “quality is verifiable through standardised process”; “commitment is measured through performance metrics”; “hierarchy defines legitimate authority”; “consistent process protects residents from individual variation.”
The analytically significant point for AC 2.1 is this: Chaffinch’s procedural changes (new systems, new management structures, new compliance frameworks) operated at the Artifact level. They may have partially addressed Espoused Values by communicating new standards. But they did not reach the Basic Assumptions level — where the actual drivers of resistance resided. Artifact-level change cannot reach basic-assumption-level resistance. This is why new procedures, even when technically understood by staff, produced continued resistance: the underlying behavioural drivers were untouched.
Lewin’s Change Model — Insufficient Unfreezing as the Root Cause
Lewin’s (1947) three-stage change model requires that organisations complete the Unfreezing stage before implementing change, because attempting to move to a new state while the old state is psychologically intact produces predictable and sustained resistance. The Chaffinch acquisition is a case study in what Lewin’s model identifies as the most common change management failure: implementing the Moving stage before Unfreezing is complete.
Unfreezing is the stage of creating psychological readiness and motivation to change. It requires communicating the need for change persuasively enough that employees become willing to release their attachment to the existing way of working. Unfreezing is not simply announcing that change is coming — it involves demonstrating why the old equilibrium is no longer viable, involving staff in understanding the rationale, and creating sufficient psychological safety for employees to let go of practices and identities that have served them until now.
Moving is the implementation stage: introducing the new systems, roles, processes, and behaviours. This is the stage that produces visible change — new procedures introduced, management structures reorganised, performance frameworks activated.
Refreezing is the stabilisation stage: embedding the new behaviours as the organisation’s new norm. New systems are reinforced, old workarounds are removed, and the new state is established as the way things are done rather than as a temporary imposition.
Chaffinch’s implementation failure is specific: new care procedures, management structures, and formal reporting lines were introduced (the Moving stage) before Calmere staff were communicated with, involved in the rationale, or psychologically prepared to release their Power culture operating assumptions (the Unfreezing stage was incomplete). When Moving happens before Unfreezing is complete, Lewin’s model predicts exactly what Chaffinch experienced: resistance that is not attitudinal but structural, because the psychological conditions for accepting the change were never established.
The root cause is not that Chaffinch changed too much. It is that Chaffinch changed without preparing the workforce to accept change. This framing — identifying the root cause as insufficient Unfreezing rather than as individual staff resistance — is what transforms an AC 2.1 answer from descriptive to analytical, which is what the command word “explain” requires at Level 5.
Why Do Employees Resist Organisational Change After a Takeover?
Handy’s (1993) framework explains the structural conditions that make resistance predictable when Power culture meets Role culture. Lewin’s (1947) model identifies the implementation failure — insufficient unfreezing — that allowed those structural conditions to produce sustained resistance. Both frameworks operate at the macro and process level. What they do not fully account for are the individual motivations that drove specific Calmere staff members to resist in the ways they did: the self-interest calculation, the information deficit, and the emotional difficulty of adaptation. Kotter and Schlesinger (1979) provide that individual-level analysis, extending the Handy and Lewin explanation from structural to human.
Kotter and Schlesinger — Four Reasons Calmere Staff Resisted Change
Kotter and Schlesinger (1979) identify four reasons why individuals resist organisational change, and all four apply to the Calmere House context with identifiable evidence from the case study.
Self-interest describes resistance arising from the fear of losing something of value. Calmere staff who held informal authority — seniority by relationship, influence through personal closeness to Kirsten, status as trusted long-serving members of the home’s community — stood to lose all of that under Chaffinch’s formal Role culture hierarchy. The new performance management system measured procedural compliance, not relational seniority. Self-interest resistance was a rational response to a perceived personal loss.
Misunderstanding describes resistance arising from insufficient communication about what the change meant and why it was happening. Chaffinch’s procedural changes may have been announced without sufficient explanation of the commercial rationale — the 100% occupancy objective, the CQC rating improvement requirement, the competitive necessity of standardisation. Staff who did not understand why the changes were happening could not evaluate them rationally and defaulted to defensive resistance.
Low tolerance for change describes the emotional difficulty of adjusting from a familiar, relationship-driven environment to an unfamiliar, process-driven one. This form of resistance is not rational self-interest — it is emotional difficulty that may persist even when the individual intellectually understands and accepts the need for change. Calmere staff who had built their working lives around personal relationships with colleagues and residents faced a genuine psychological adjustment that formal procedures alone cannot address.
Different assessment of the situation describes resistance arising from a genuine disagreement about whether the old way of working was a problem. Long-serving Calmere staff may have believed that Kirsten’s personal management model produced better care outcomes than Chaffinch’s standardised approach — and they may have had evidence for that belief in the quality of resident relationships and care under the previous ownership.
For full treatment of Lewin’s three-stage model across other CIPD change management contexts, Lewin’s change model CIPD application provides a broader methodological analysis. The voice and selection changes at Chaffinch that compound these culture problems are addressed in the 5CO01 AC 2.2 employee voice page.
Model Answer for CIPD 5CO01 AC 2.1 — Chaffinch Group Culture Problems
The following model answer demonstrates how a student should structure and evidence a 5CO01 AC 2.1 response. It applies Handy, Schein, and Lewin to Chaffinch-specific evidence, uses the command word “explain” analytically, and is written at CIPD Level 5 academic standard with Harvard referencing. The Chaffinch Group’s full entity context is available on the Chaffinch Group case study page, and a full worked assignment across all ACs is indexed on the CIPD 5CO01 assignment example page.
AC 2.1 requires students to use theories and models of organisational and human behaviour to explain why problems have arisen following Chaffinch Group’s takeover of Calmere House. This model answer applies Handy (1993), Schein (1985), and Lewin (1947) to evidence from the case study.
The problems arising after Chaffinch Group’s acquisition of Calmere House are explained by three complementary theoretical frameworks that together account for the structural, cognitive, and procedural dimensions of the post-acquisition difficulties.
Handy (1993) classifies organisational cultures into four types: Power, Role, Task, and Person. Calmere House, under the sole ownership and management of Kirsten, operated as a Power culture: authority radiated from Kirsten as the central figure, staff loyalty was directed at her personally rather than at the organisation as an institution, and decisions were made informally through personal relationships rather than documented procedures. Chaffinch Group, as a corporate care home organisation with board governance and standardised systems operating across multiple sites, represents a Role culture: authority derives from formal role position, behaviour is governed by written rules and reporting lines, and performance is measured against standardised criteria. Handy’s framework predicts that when a Power culture is absorbed into a Role culture, the staff who operated within the Power culture experience loss of personal identity in work, loss of direct decision-making access, and uncertainty as informal norms are replaced by written procedures. These experiences produce resistance as a structural outcome, not as individual behaviour failure.
Schein (1985) deepens this analysis by explaining why Chaffinch’s procedural interventions — new care record systems, restructured management, formal performance frameworks — did not resolve the resistance. Schein identifies three culture levels: Artifacts (visible and tangible), Espoused Values (stated beliefs), and Basic Assumptions (unconscious, taken-for-granted beliefs that actually govern behaviour). Chaffinch’s new procedures addressed the Artifact level. Calmere staff’s resistance, by contrast, was rooted at the Basic Assumptions level: the belief that quality care is achieved through personal relationships, not through standardised process, and that loyalty to individuals defines professional commitment. Artifact-level change cannot reach basic-assumption-level resistance, which explains why the problems persisted even after new systems were fully introduced.
Lewin (1947) identifies the specific implementation failure that transformed the predictable culture clash into sustained resistance. His three-stage change model requires Unfreezing (creating psychological readiness to change), Moving (implementing new behaviours and systems), and Refreezing (stabilising the new state). Chaffinch implemented the Moving stage — new procedures, structures, and compliance requirements — before completing the Unfreezing stage. Calmere staff were not communicated with persuasively, involved in the rationale, or given the psychological preparation to release their Power culture operating assumptions before the new systems were imposed. This structural failure, not individual resistance or poor management, is the root cause of the sustained problems following the acquisition.
Addressing these problems requires HR to prioritise the Unfreezing stage retrospectively: communicating the commercial rationale (100% occupancy, CQC rating improvement), involving staff in shaping how the new systems are implemented, and building the relational capital that Chaffinch’s formal structures have not yet provided.
Frequently Asked Questions — CIPD 5CO01 AC 2.1 Chaffinch Culture Problems
How many theories do I need to use for 5CO01 AC 2.1?
AC 2.1 specifies “theories and models” in the plural, requiring a minimum of two distinct theoretical frameworks. The most effective combination for the Chaffinch case study is Handy (1993) for culture type classification and Lewin (1947) for change management process failure. Adding Schein (1985) strengthens the answer by explaining why Chaffinch’s artifact-level procedural changes failed to reach the basic assumption level driving resistance. Using all three frameworks, each applied to specific Chaffinch and Calmere evidence, places the answer at the higher end of the marking scale. Generic theory descriptions without case study application do not earn credit at Level 5 — the theory must explain the Chaffinch phenomenon, not describe it in the abstract.
What is the difference between Schein’s espoused values and basic assumptions?
Schein (1985) distinguishes three culture levels with fundamentally different accessibility and resistance to change. Espoused values are what an organisation publicly states it believes: Calmere’s stated commitment to personalised care through personal relationships is an espoused value. Basic assumptions are unconscious, taken-for-granted beliefs that actually drive behaviour — for Calmere staff, the assumption that relationships matter more than processes governed how they worked, even though they could not easily articulate that assumption as a belief. The significance for AC 2.1 is that Chaffinch’s new procedures addressed the artifact level and may have partially addressed espoused values, but did not reach the basic assumption level. Resistance persisted because the deepest behavioural drivers remained untouched by the procedural changes.
Can I use Kotter’s 8-step model instead of Lewin for AC 2.1?
Kotter’s (1996) 8-step Leading Change model is an academically valid alternative and can be applied to the Chaffinch acquisition. However, Lewin’s (1947) three-stage model maps more directly to the specific failure point in this case: the insufficient unfreezing before procedural implementation. Kotter’s framework would require evidencing the absence of “creating urgency” and “forming a guiding coalition” as the failure steps — which is also supportable from the case study. Both models are valid at Level 5; the mark-earning requirement is consistent application to Chaffinch and Calmere evidence, not abstract description of the model’s stages. Choosing Lewin is generally recommended because the three-stage structure maps most cleanly to the AC 2.1 question about why problems arose and what specifically went wrong.