The Importance of Dealing with Change in an Organization

Change in organizations is not always taken in a positive way as people take in their personal lives. In an organizational structure, change is not voluntary. The management often imposes it. The purpose of change positive and constructive but the results are not always constructive. It is not accepted most of the times. Some human beings have the tendency to resist change. This resistance is one of the most challenging things in an organization. It can be said that this resistance of change creates the need for Change management. Though it is not always the resistance, generally any change requires to be dealt with a great deal of wisdom, as adopting any new change is a challenge in itself. Organizations have different types of people with different personalities, perceptions, attitudes and caliber (Van Oorschot et al. 2013). All these things determine their reaction to Change. The following report would be focusing on various journal articles and literature reviews for providing information about the recent theories and concepts in Change Management.

There are seven aspects of change management of any organization. These seven factors affect each other. The seven aspects of change management are

• Strategy
• Structure
• Systems
• Shared Values
• Style
• Staff
• Skills (Kuipers et al. 2014)

The assessment of strategy is required to be formal to let the organization move forward with a purpose and to gain advantage over the competitors. The organization for assessment of its strategies certain things are to be cleared first. The organization must be clear about their objectives. The organization should identify the strategies they will be taking for achieving the objectives. The measures the organization is taking to stay competitive in the market. Whether those strategies will adapt to the situation is an important question if yes how. Next aspect is structure. The structure of the organization is important as it determines what strategies organizations must take. Ways in which the individual team members organize themselves and the person responsible for taking the decisions in the organization. Methods used for communicating the strategies. The frequency of the communication process within the organization determines the awareness of the staff members about the strategies and changes that are being implemented (Langley et al., 2013). The organization system needs to be analyzed. Processes and their management are also equally important. Shared values are another important aspect as it helps in determination of the shared values in the organization. Company culture and team culture helps in gaining sufficient knowledge about reaction and attitude of employees to a particular change. This will help the management to take measures that will be effective in case of any resistance from the end of the customers. The organization needs to assess the style in which the departments and teams are managed. The extent to which the organization’s leadership and management are active helps in knowing the effectiveness of the management to motivate people for accepting the change. The last most important factor is staff. It is important to determine what the positions that have been filled and the skills the new employees possess. These factors will help in knowing whether the employees would be able to adapt to the change. New changes are often made on the existing skills of the employees.

Factors Affecting the Change Management Process

In order to have understanding about change it is very important to have knowledge about process studies. Process studies emphasizes on the reasons behind the emergence, development, growth or termination of things over time. Time is an important factor for process studies as it puts light on the role played by tensions and contradictions that become driving factors for change and hence show how the interactions in different level affect change. The process studies of change emphasizes on the world of process, evaluates the question regarding the managerial and organizational phenomena emerges, and changes overtime. Earlier the concept of process studies was not focused. One of the key findings from the previous works is that values of employees in an organization are enduring and stable still values change with time.  Interactions and interpersonal relations among the employees tend to affect and change the values of the employees. Values are distributive, relational, interactive and a continuous process. Innovative organizational changes emerge with the help of sense establishing. In presence of diverse logics and rational tends to create paradoxes which needs navigations. When people know about the paradoxes they look for creative ways and if they do not have any knowledge about paradoxes they tend stuck at the paradox (Van der Voet 2014). The changes in corporate strategies in four different ways, focused, punctuated, temporarily switching and regular. Those companies that keep changes regularly perform better than those companies that change irregularly. The managers cannot predict the consequences of the decisions. Events that take place can be negotiated but the outcomes of those events are dependent on many other factors that cannot be controlled by the organization. Some outcomes are favorable while others are not in such case changes either occur on their own or are required by the situation.  According to the theory of institutional change in which the society-level change, resource creates pressures of organization-level. When there are deviations in the field values by the peripheral actors triggering work by mid-status actors that aligns the societal, filed and organizational levels. Some of the important factors of change, which cannot be escaped are, time, timing in the human affairs, and the lives of people the people in an organization. Even after being an important factor, time is often overlooked by many research scholars. Temporality has been one of the important factors as discussed by many scholars of this field. According to Van Oorschot et al. (2013) theory of decision trap in which the contemporary temporal activities are stretched at the cost of reduction and elimination of the time available for upcoming activities. It shows that decisions that appeared good once later turned destructive in another event. They show that in case of mergers the balance between the political and economical factors changes over time, which leads to taking up different management strategies. According to Klaner and Raisch (2013) who have extracted the data from the annual reports 67 European insurance companies, they have shown the data and coded it in six patterns of change. With the help of innovative, multiple sequence alignment method that is being derived from biological sciences and then shown that regularity in the ongoing organizational changes is related to the performance, with the help of statistical methods of comparison.

The Role of Process Studies

Changes in the public sector are usually deliberate that are caused to the structures and processes of public sector organizations aiming for better administration. In order to have a fruitful impact on the system reform programs and measures needs to result in changes in the work processes of public organizations and in the attitudes and behaviors of the staffs who work in these organizations. The results of the public sector reforms are not always as expected. According to Pollit and Dan (2013) differences between the anticipated results and the actual results can be understood if the implementation of the reforms are evaluated carefully. Researches on public sector reforms have shown that the implementation process of the change management has always been overlooked which happens both at individual and organizational level. Organizations comply with the various environmental pressures in their respective areas to get the desired goals. Some approaches are focused on the role of the agencies in the change process. The knowledge of change management can be gained from various epistemological and ontological traditions. For instance as per some of the concepts of organizational change, it is a temporary aspect of organizational upheaval while some approaches suggest that the idea of organization change is an aspect of social construction. Some scholars emphasize on the large-scale organizational turnarounds and focus on the planned organizational change. Some of the authors focus on the emergent nature of change.

Change management focuses on the process through which the change is being implemented.  Change management is largely dependent on the object of change, the content of change and the process of change. This provides a way to manage organizational change. The most applied approach is the planned approach to organizational change. The planned processes are dependent on the role of management. The planned change implementation is a complex thing as it requires proper evaluation and monitoring or else change would not be implemented properly. Intentional and planned changes have purpose, which needs to be completed, or else the change would not be effective (Ashkenas 2013). Although, implementation of Change might see certain obstacles that affects the change process this can be caused by scarcity of resources or lack of improper planning. Therefore, the change management requires proper planning beforehand.

Organizations require changes but it is not always positively accepted by the employees. People do have the tendency to resist change that occurs in an organization. Changes in the operatiponal system are one of the most common types of changes Technological changes are usually difficult to be accepted by people. According to Klarner and Raisch (2013) companies in order to outperform requires changing from time to time. However, the main thing is how change is managed. Organizations are required to take measures to combat the resistance to change.

Challenges of Change Management in Public Sector Organizations

Public sector organizations have a very complex structure and large size. Change management in public sector is very difficult. The objective of public sector organizations are usually development and the change is usually intentional. Changes in public sector takes a long time as the system of operations in public sector is very formal and a number of procedures are involve. The complexity in the operational system in public sector is because of its structure. Public sectors have many stakeholders and there is too much of Government interference. Too much interference from the end of Government usually makes the process complex. The core values of public sector consist of a number of values of diverse employees working in that organization (Pollitt and Dan 2013). Since there are many employees, there is diversity in their personality, perception and thought process. The chances resistance to change increases, when there are many stakeholders in any business resistance comes from external environment as well. External resistance is often strong enough to hinder the change process. Depending on the number of departments, staffs are recruited. The skills of the staff members vary from department to department. Collaboration of these skills helps in effective implementation of change. The 7-S model of change management can be applied effectively to present day public sector organizations. The model however is more appropriate for private organizations as the structure of public sector organizations are very complex. An additional ‘S’ has a major role to play in the public sector organization. The eighth S of the public sector can be the stakeholders because public sector has many stakeholders from employees to government bodies to public. The changes are made as per either the stakeholders or the stakeholders affect the change process both positively as well as negatively. The present day scenario has changed largely and management of change needs more knowledge and skills. Certain factors have emerged within the organization and outside that has greater role to play. For an instance, if a public sector today is planning to bring a new technology for the operations. They will have to consider how will the stakeholders like from affect the change where the technology be brought (suppliers), will the employees be able to cope up with the new technology and what will be the impact of the technology on operation and ultimately the customers and the public.

Conclusion

Change is an essential for any organization, what is more important is change management. It can be concluded from the discussions that proper planning is required for change management. In public sector, mostly change is intentional because it takes place for efficiency improvement and development. There are certain changes that are forced changes for which one has to adapt and it occurs due to an event or occurrence. Change management is important so that the implementation is done in the proper way and the purpose of change can be achieved. Process studies are very important for change management because in order to implement the change the process is required to be analyzed. The application of 7-s model it was seen that stakeholders had a major role to play in change management. It can be said that 7-S model of the change management fails to completely describe the change process of modern day public organization.

References

Ashkenas, R., 2013. Change management needs to change. Harvard Business Review, 16.

Klarner, P., & Raisch, S. 2013. Move to the beat: Rhythms of change and firm performance. Academy of Management Journal, 56: 160-184.

Kuipers, B.S., Higgs, M., Kickert, W., Tummers, L., Grandia, J. and Van der Voet, J., 2014. The management of change in public organizations: A literature review. Public Administration, 92(1), pp.1-20.

Langley, A., Smallman, C., Tsoukas, H. and Van de Ven, A.H., 2013. Process studies of change in organization and management: Unveiling temporality, activity, and flow. Academy of Management Journal, 56(1), pp.1-13.

Pollitt, C. and Dan, S., 2013. Searching for impacts in performance-oriented management reform: A review of the European literature. Public Performance & Management Review, 37(1), pp.7-32.

Van der Voet, J., 2014. The effectiveness and specificity of change management in a public organization: Transformational leadership and a bureaucratic organizational structure. European Management Journal, 32(3), pp.373-382.

Van Oorschot, K.E., Akkermans, H., Sengupta, K. and Van Wassenhove, L.N., 2013. Anatomy of a decision trap in complex new product development projects. Academy of Management Journal, 56(1), pp.285-307.

Van der Voet, J., Kuipers, B.S. and Groeneveld, S., 2016. A Change Management Perspective. Theory and Practice of Public Sector Reform, 27, p.79.