Six : strategies for minimizing resistance to change, and debate ways effectively create an urgency for change.
1st Strategy:
Communication
Example:
Customer complaint letters are shown to employees.
Applied when employees don’t feel an urgency for change or don’t know how the change will affect them.
Problems
Time-consuming and potentially costly.
2nd Strategy
Learning
3rd Strategy:
Employee involvement
Example: Employees learn how to work in teams as company adopts a team-based structure.
Applied when employees need to break old routines and adopt new role patterns.
Problem: Time-consuming and potentially costly.
Example: Company forms task force to recommend new customer service practices.
Applied when the change effort needs more employee commitment, some employees need to save face, and/or employee ideas would improve decisions about the change strategy.
Problems:Very time-consuming. Might lead to conflict and poor decisions if employees’ interests are incompatible with organizational needs.
4th Strategy:Stress management
Example: Employees attend sessions to discuss their worries about the change.
Applied
when communication, training, and involvement do not sufficiently ease employee worries.
Problem: Time-consuming and potentially expensive. Some methods may not reduce stress for all employees.
5th Strategy:Negotiation
Employees agree to replace strict job categories with multiskilling in return for increased job security.
Applied when employees will clearly lose something of value from the change and would not otherwise support the new conditions. Also necessary when the company must change quickly.
Problem: May be expensive, particularly if other employees want to negotiate their support. Also tends to produce compliance but not commitment to the change.
6th Strategy: Coercion
Example: Company president tells managers to “get on board” the change or leave.
Applied when other strategies are ineffective and the company needs to change quickly.
Problems: Can lead to more subtle forms of resistance,
as well as long-term antagonism with the change agent.
CHAPTER 12: ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE
(PART 2)
How leadership, coalitions, social networks, and pilot projects influence organizational change.
Two cross-cultural and three ethical issues in organizational change.
LEADERSHIP
A key element of leading change is a strategic vision. A leader's vision provides a sense of direction and establishes the critical sucess factors against which the real changes are evaluated.
COALITIONS
Organizational stage is that change agents cannot lead the initiative alone. They need assistance of several people with a similar degree of commitment to change
Which is called a guding coalition is the most important factor in the success of public sector organizational change programs.
SOCIAL NETWORKS
Social networks are social structures of individuals or social units. For example, departments, organisation, that are connected to each other through one or more forms of interdependence.
PILOT PROJECTS
U.s retailer Best Buy introduced a Results-Only Work Environment. (ROWE) initiative to support work-life balance and employment expectations of younger workforce. ROWE is a significant departure traditional employment relationship, so Best Buy wisely introduced an early version of this initiative as a pilot project.
TWO CROSS CULTURAL ISSUES IN ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE
One possible cross cultural limitation is that Western organizational change models, such as Lewin's force field analysis, often assume that change has a beginning and an ending in a logical linear sequence
THREE ETHICAL CHANGE IN ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE
Another cross cultural issue with some organizational change interventions is their assumption that is effective organizational change is ecessarily punctuated by tension and over conflict.
- One ethical concern is the risk of violating individual privacy rights.
- A second ethical concern is that some of change activitivities potentially increase management's power by inducing compliance and conformity in organizational members.
- A third concern is that some organizational change interventions undermine the individual's self-eseem.
Learning is an important process in most change initiatives because employees require new knowledge and skillets fit the organisation 's evolving requirements.
Communication is the highest priority and first strategy
Communication improves the change process in at least two ways.
- Which is by generating an urgency to change. Leaders motivate employees to support the change by candidly telling them about the external threats and opportunities that make change so important.
- Secondly, communication minimises resistance to change is by illuminating the future and there reducing fear of the unknown. The more corporate leaders communicate their vision, particularly details about that future and milestones already achieved toward that future. The more easily employees can understand their own roles in that future.
Employees who participate in decisions about a change tend too feel more personal responsibility for it's successful implementation, rather than being disinterested ages of someone else's decisions.
Organisational change is a stressful experience for many people because it threatens self-esteem and creates uncertainty about the future.
Negotiation is a form of influence that involves the promise benefits or resources in exchange for the target person's compliance with, rather than commitment to, the change effort, so it might not be effective in a long term.
lf strategy fails, leaders can rely on coercion to change organisation. Coercion ca include persistently reminding people of their obligations, frequently monitoring behaviour to ensure compliance, confronting people who who do to change, and using threats of sanctions to force compliance.