INTRODUCTION
1.1 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
In a workplace or organization change occurs rapidly and often, in many businesses due to the dynamic nature of the environment which poses several challenges to organization effectiveness and performance. This change may take place in order to respond to a new opportunity or to avoid a threat to the company. Regardless of the reason, change can be difficult for all involved, i.e. managers and employees face new challenges with change and managers must learn to ease the difficulty of the transition, one of the major issues associated with managing change is reactive versus proactive responses to change. This systematic change approach have its peculiarities which invades the existing state, culture and other variables in an organization.
Warrilow (2010) stated that in the current economic climate, all organizations are experiencing the impacts of change and many could now benefit from the practical knowledge of how to manage change. He emphasized that at root change management is about process and people. But even process is just about people doing stuff.. so ultimately it is all about people and processes that work for people. Therefore, any organizational initiative that creates change or has a significant change element to it has a 70% chance of not achieving what was originally envisaged. The main three (3) reasons for failure include:
a) Gap – The gap between the strategic vision and a successful programme implementation and the lack of a practical change management model and tools to bridge that gap.
b) Resistance – The hidden and built in resistance to change of organizational cultures and the lack of processes and change management methodologies to address this.
c) Impact – The failure to take full account of the impact of the changes on those people who are most affected by them.
Warrilow (2010) disclosed that there are 3 keys to realizing the benefits of change viz: -
i) Leadership: The critical importance of the emotional dimension of leaderships plays a long role. We speak of change management but in truth change has to be led as well as managed. This is especially true if it is a step change that need to be handled as a separate initiative outside of the constraints of business as usual. The style of leadership that is needed is a leadership that connects with people and that directly addresses what is important to them.
ii) Management Process: The necessity for the holistic approach of a programme management based on change process is paramount. The management aspect of how to manage change needs to be much boarder based that a typical project led/task oriented approach to address the human factors and deals directly with the commonest causes of failure.
iii) Actionable steps: Knowing how to translate vision and strategy into actionable steps. At the micro level, day to day operational level of change management need to show people the specifics of what is required of them and to assist them especially during the early stages.
Thus change management principles at all times involve and agree support from people within system (system = environment, process, culture, relationships behaviour etc whether personal or organizational)
Kotter (1996) describe a helpful model for understanding and managing change. Each stage acknowledges a key principle identified by Kotter relating to people response and approach to change in which people see, feel and then change. And the Kotter’s eight step change model can be summarized as
- Increase urgency: Inspire people to move, make objectives real and relevant
- Build the guiding team: Get the right people in place with the right emotion commitment and the right mix of skills and levels
- Get the vision right: Get the team to establish a simple vision and strategy, focus on emotional and creative aspects necessary to drive service and efficiency.
- Communicate for buy-in: Involve as many people as possible, communicate the essentials, simply and to appeal and respond to people’s needs. De-cutter communications make technology work for you rather than against.
- Empower action: Remove obstacles, enable constructive feedback and lots of support from leaders, reward and recognize progress and achievements.
- Create short term wins: Set aims that are easy to achieve in bite size, chunks. Manageable numbers of initiatives, finish current stages before starting new ones.
- Don’t let up”: Foster and encourage determination and persistence, ongoing change encourage ongoing progress reporting, highlight achieved and future milestones.
- Make change stick: – Reinforce the value of successful change via recruitment, promotion new change leaders. Weave change into culture.
Apart from the model approach of control, change management strategy are build under some fundamental elements which include, “situational awareness” (understand the change and who is impacted), “supporting structures (team and sponsor structures) and “Strategy analysis (risks, resistance and special tactics). These factors notwithstanding there are reasons why organization need a change management strategy. A “one –size – fits – all” approach is not effective for change management, but some embodying reasons comprises of
- Acquiring a company of near equal size
- Getting suppliers to use a new web-based form and process
- Relocating office spaces within an existing building
- Implementing an enterprise resource planning solution
- Reorienting around processed instead of functions
- Releasing a new product.
Orlikowski and Hofman (1996) arguing on the need for a change stood on the view that old practices must be obliterated and new processes designed from scratch to fully leverage new technologies and business realities, in practice, few managers have the luxury of re-designing their processes or organizations from “clean sheet of paper: people, equipment and business knowledge cannot be so easily scrapped. Furthermore organization change almost inevitability becomes a learning process in which unanticipated obstacles and opportunities emerge.
Crowston and Malone (1988) and Barua, Lee and Whinston (1995) are of the view that the difficulties many organizations have had with change management depends in large part on an inadequate recognition of interdependencies among technology, practice and strategy. However, beneficial a new machine incentive system product line, decision making structure or reporting system may appear in isolation, the acid test is how it interacts as it must with numerous other aspects of the organization. Recognizing the critical role that interdependence play in affecting outcomes leads to new analysis and theory. Thus, managers must plan a strategy that takes into account and coordinates the interactions among all the components of a business system.
Rockart and Short (1991) stated that interactions can create a virtuous cycle of positive feedback which amplify even small steps in the right direction. Because new organizational paradigms eliminate tune, space, and inventory buffers as operations becomes more tightly coupled, ignoring such interdependencies becoming increasingly risky.
McCann (2004) in a collaborative attempt stated that the study of organizational effectiveness has dramatically evolved with the adoption of general systems theory concepts and changes in the complexity and pace of change of organizational environments. He reiterates that there are two critically important emerging qualities or dimensions effectiveness organizational agility and organizational residency”. Organizational effectiveness has always measured how successfully organizations achieve their missions through their core strategies.
| Project details | Contents |
|---|---|
| Number of Pages | 132 pages |
| Chapter one | Introduction |
| Chapter two | Literature review |
| Chapter three | methodology |
| Chapter four | Data analysis |
| Chapter five | Summary,discussion & recommendations |
| Reference | Reference |
| Questionnaire | Questionnaire |
| Appendix | Appendix |
| Chapter summary | 1 to 5 chapters |
| Available document | PDF and MS-word format |
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