Organizational Change
Companies that are undergoing or that have undergone a transformation. This keyword should always be used in conjunction with "Success Story" or "Experiment" or "Failed Experiment."
Organizational change is an ongoing process in order to bring the organizational systems and processes in line with the factors prevailing in the external and internal environment of the organization. The forces of organizational change include internal and external forces. Organization Development (OD) refers to the framework consisting of planned-change interventions involving human interactions that seeks to improve organizational effectiveness. OD is an effective tool to manage change. The paper discusses the dynamics of change management.
Organizational change is an ongoing process in order to bring the organizational systems and processes in line with the factors prevailing in the external and internal environment of the organization. The forces of organizational change include internal and external forces. Organization Development (OD) refers to the framework consisting of planned-change interventions involving human interactions that seeks to improve organizational effectiveness. OD is an effective tool to manage change. The paper discusses the dynamics of change management.
Organizational change initiatives to realign company objectives, capital and resources become necessary when the company shifts its strategic focus in response to exogenous market forces or events that require it to examine the way it does business and implement a new framework to accommodate changed goals and objectives. Despite this re-orientation, not all companies experience a smooth transition to the new paradigm.
Managing Organizational Change
It is important to have a change in the organization. In addition, such change should be successful and must contribute towards the success of the organization. The main objective of this paper is to characterize the prevalence of the change process in organizations and understand what occurs during organizational change and the forces responsible for unplanned organizational change. Organization change is a planned or unplanned transformation in an organization’s structure, technology, or people. However, there are internal as well as external factors forcing the change. Besides this, there are critical issues in the organizational development. One should be able to overcome such issues and led to effective change in the organization.
Learning Objectives For Organizational Change
Organizational change is important to usher in long-term success in an organization. A change entails realignment of organizational systems and processes. Managing change involves institutionalizing the philosophy of change in the organization. Effective change management entails creating a definitive vision and managing the transition to the desired future state.
Organizational Change And Stress Management
The forces prevailing in internal or external environment of an organization necessitate organizational change. The prime challenge before organizations is to fully institutionalize the philosophy of the change. The organizational change can be either planned or unplanned. After the change has been effected, initially, there is a resistance to change, primarily, because people have fear of the unknown. This can be overcome by effectively teaching the employees about the philosophy and the reasons for the change. The paper examines change management. In this context, stress management is also discussed.
Steps in the Organizational Change Process
• Assess need for change
• Decide on the change
• Implement change
• Evaluate change
The Three Greatest Barriers to Organizational Change
The need for rapid organizational change is a fact of life in today's business environment. While there may be a few companies whose leaders are committed to a belief that it is good for everyone to "shake things up" from time to time, most organizational change is undertaken to accomplish key strategic goals. No matter how necessary change seems to upper management, many barriers must be broken down if a planned strategic change is to be implemented successfully. The key to successful change is in the planning and the implementation. The three greatest barriers to organizational change are most often the following.
1. Inadequate Culture-shift Planning. Most companies are good at planning changes in reporting structure, work area placement, job responsibilities, and administrative structure. Organizational charts are commonly revised again and again. Timelines are established, benchmarks are set, transition teams are appointed, etc. Failure to foresee and plan for resultant cultural change, however, is also common. When the planning team is too narrowly defined or too focused on objective analysis and critical thinking, it becomes too easy to lose sight of the fact that the planned change will affect people. Even at work, people make many decisions on the basis of feelings and intuition. When the feelings of employees are overlooked, the result is often deep resentment because some unrecognized taboo or tradition has not been duly respected.
2. Lack of Employee Involvement. People have an inherent fear of change. In most strategic organizational change, at least some employees will be asked to assume different responsibilities or focus on different aspects of their knowledge or skill. The greater the change a person is asked to make, the more pervasive that person's fear will be. There will be fear of change. More important, however, there will be fear of failure in the new role. Involving employees as soon as possible in the change effort, letting them create as much of the change as is possible and practical is key to a successful change effort. As employees understand the reasons for the change and have an opportunity to "try the change on for size" they more readily accept and support the change.
3. Flawed Communication Strategies. Ideal communication strategies in situations of significant organizational change must attend to the message, the method of delivery, the timing, and the importance of information shared with various parts of the organization. Many leaders believe that if they tell people what they (the leaders) feel they need to know about the change, then everyone will be on board and ready to move forward. In reality, people need to understand why the change is being made, but more importantly, how the change is likely to affect them. A big picture announcement from the CEO does little to help people understand and accept change. People want to hear about change from their direct supervisor. A strategy of engaging direct supervision and allowing them to manage the communication process is the key to a successful change communication plan.
2. Lack of Employee Involvement. People have an inherent fear of change. In most strategic organizational change, at least some employees will be asked to assume different responsibilities or focus on different aspects of their knowledge or skill. The greater the change a person is asked to make, the more pervasive that person's fear will be. There will be fear of change. More important, however, there will be fear of failure in the new role. Involving employees as soon as possible in the change effort, letting them create as much of the change as is possible and practical is key to a successful change effort. As employees understand the reasons for the change and have an opportunity to "try the change on for size" they more readily accept and support the change.
3. Flawed Communication Strategies. Ideal communication strategies in situations of significant organizational change must attend to the message, the method of delivery, the timing, and the importance of information shared with various parts of the organization. Many leaders believe that if they tell people what they (the leaders) feel they need to know about the change, then everyone will be on board and ready to move forward. In reality, people need to understand why the change is being made, but more importantly, how the change is likely to affect them. A big picture announcement from the CEO does little to help people understand and accept change. People want to hear about change from their direct supervisor. A strategy of engaging direct supervision and allowing them to manage the communication process is the key to a successful change communication plan.
Radical Type of Organizational Change
• Automation
Automation Planning and Organizational Change: A Functional Model for Developing a Systems Plan
Automation represents one of the greatest changes a library can undergo. An automation plan must not only produce an optimum system, but prepare the staff, institution and clientele for far-reaching change. This change can be accommodated by a functional model consisting of three phases: 1) organization and overview, 2) project expansion, and 3) project consolidation and preparationof the system plan. An educational program is the centerpiece of the process.
• Rationalization of procedures
Report on Rationalization of Procedures: (for) Building Approvals and Completion Certificates
The Committee deliberated upon the procedures for grant of building plan approvals and completion certificates including the role of the Delhi Urban Arts Commission therein. The consensus of the opinion was that the present procedures involving a multiplicity of authorities were resulting in considerable harassment and delays. The present procedures of scrutiny of building plans, issue of C & D forms and completion certificate is very cumbersome and involved delays at each stage due to site inspections and site reports. Further, since there was no single person specifically responsible for adherence to regulations at the approval or completion stage, owners with the connivance of building officials and unscrupulous architects, indulged in violations for financial advantage. Thus while honest owners are harassed, unscrupulous architects, indulged in violations for financial advantage. Thus while honest owners are harassed, unscrupulous ones get away with serious violations.
• Business reengineering
Business process reengineering (BPR) is the analysis and redesign of workflow within and between enterprises. BPR reached its heyday in the early 1990's when Michael Hammer and James Champy published their best-selling book, "Reengineering the Corporation". The authors promoted the idea that sometimes radical redesign and reorganization of an enterprise (wiping the slate clean) was necessary to lower costs and increase quality of service and that information technology was the key enabler for that radical change. Hammer and Champy felt that the design of workflow in most large corporations was based on assumptions about technology, people, and organizational goals that were no longer valid. They suggested seven principles of reengineering to streamline the work process and thereby achieve significant levels of improvement in quality, time management, and cost:
1. Organize around outcomes, not tasks.2. Identify all the processes in an organization and prioritize them in order of redesign urgency.
3. Integrate information processing work into the real work that produces the information.
4. Treat geographically dispersed resources as though they were centralized.
5. Link parallel activities in the workflow instead of just integrating their results.
6. Put the decision point where the work is performed, and build control into the process.
7. Capture information once and at the source.
The impact of BPR on organizational performance
The two cornerstones of any organization are the people and the processes. If individuals are motivated and working hard, yet the business processes are cumbersome and non-essential activities remain, organizational performance will be poor. Business Process Reengineering is the key to transforming how people work. What appear to be minor changes in processes can have dramatic effects on cash flow, service delivery and customer satisfaction. Even the act of documenting business processes alone will typically improve organizational efficiency by 10%.
How to implement a BPR projectThe best way to map and improve the organization's procedures is to take a top down approach, and not undertake a project in isolation. That means:
• Starting with mission statements that define the purpose of the organization and describe what sets it apart from others in its sector or industry.
• Producing vision statements which define where the organization is going, to provide a clear picture of the desired future position.
• Build these into a clear business strategy thereby deriving the project objectives.
• Defining behaviours that will enable the organization to achieve its' aims.
• Producing key performance measures to track progress.
• Relating efficiency improvements to the culture of the organization
• Identifying initiatives that will improve performance.
• Starting with mission statements that define the purpose of the organization and describe what sets it apart from others in its sector or industry.
• Producing vision statements which define where the organization is going, to provide a clear picture of the desired future position.
• Build these into a clear business strategy thereby deriving the project objectives.
• Defining behaviours that will enable the organization to achieve its' aims.
• Producing key performance measures to track progress.
• Relating efficiency improvements to the culture of the organization
• Identifying initiatives that will improve performance.
• Paradigm shifts
A paradigm shift is an often radical change of paradigm. It is the successful new theory which explains a phenomenon or phenomena that the previous theory fails to. The term was first used by Thomas Kuhn in his famous 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Paradigm shift (or revolutionary science) is the term first used by Thomas Kuhn in his influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) to describe a change in basic assumptions within the ruling theory of science. It is in contrast to his idea of normal science.
The term paradigm shift, as a change in a fundamental model of events, has since become widely applied to many other realms of human experience as well, even though Kuhn himself restricted the use of the term to the hard sciences. According to Kuhn, "A paradigm is what members of a scientific community, and they alone, share." (The Essential Tension, 1977). Unlike a normal scientist, Kuhn held, "a student in the humanities has constantly before him a number of competing and incommensurable solutions to these problems, solutions that he must ultimately examine for himself." (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions). Once a paradigm shift is complete, a scientist cannot, for example, posit the possibility that miasma causes disease or that ether carries light. In contrast, a critic in the Humanities can choose to adopt a 19th-century theory of poetics, for instance.
Paradigm shift (or revolutionary science) is the term first used by Thomas Kuhn in his influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) to describe a change in basic assumptions within the ruling theory of science. It is in contrast to his idea of normal science.
The term paradigm shift, as a change in a fundamental model of events, has since become widely applied to many other realms of human experience as well, even though Kuhn himself restricted the use of the term to the hard sciences. According to Kuhn, "A paradigm is what members of a scientific community, and they alone, share." (The Essential Tension, 1977). Unlike a normal scientist, Kuhn held, "a student in the humanities has constantly before him a number of competing and incommensurable solutions to these problems, solutions that he must ultimately examine for himself." (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions). Once a paradigm shift is complete, a scientist cannot, for example, posit the possibility that miasma causes disease or that ether carries light. In contrast, a critic in the Humanities can choose to adopt a 19th-century theory of poetics, for instance.
A paradigm is our perception of reality, our view of the world. It is our interpretation of events based on previous teaching we have received. If our paradigm is based only on our input from the media of conventional newspapers, magazines, radio, television, Hollywood films, public education etc., may God help us, for we will only see things the way they, the elite and wealthy rulers of this world who control these sources of information, want us to see things! This is often the opposite of the Truth. A paradigm shift means to have a sudden change in perception, a sudden change in point of view, of how you see things. Hopefully this change will be in the right direction. (Based on Stephen R. Covey's definition in "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People")
Sources:
http://dictionary.bnet.com/definition/organizational+change.html
http://searchcio.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid182_gci536451,00.html
http://www.architexturez.net/+/subject-listing/000073.shtmlhttp://www.emeraldinsight.com/10.1108/eb047604
http://www.teamtechnology.co.uk/business-process-reengineering.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift
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