Managing Change Within The Organization

CUMMINGS, T. G. AND WORLEY, C. G. (2001). Essentials of Organization development and change. Cincinnati: South-Western College Publishing.

Implementing change in an organization is complicated. It is important that a manager understands their role and responsibilities for which could very well be the success or failure of an organization. A manager should know how to handle staff resistance, and the areas that require change. There are processes that help management with assisting their staff members with adjusting to change and concentrate on the areas of importance. This process includes planning, assessment, implementation, and evaluation. The difference between a failed organization and a successful manager is when the manager has the ability to implement change with little disruption to

Lippitt’s Phases of Change is an extension of Lewin’s Three-Step Theory. The focus on Lippitt’s change theory is on the change agent rather than the change itself.

The merging of public expectations into a business model is not just about implementing change in an organization. It's about recognizing that change is for a reason of improving the wider social or community benefits and integrating bottom line profitability potentials. To make this happen, there has to be a blending of these values such that both elements of the new organization are realized an effort that is only now just beginning to happen (. Many organizations seem to want to achieve this goal even if it means moving their operations into the field of chaos where innovation gets to mix with opportunity.

Week 3, the lecture on Managing Change describes organizational changes that occur when a company makes a shift from its current state to some preferred future state. Managing organizational change is the process of planning and implementing change in organizations in such a way as to decrease employee resistance and cost to the organization while concurrently expanding the effectiveness of the change effort. Today's business environment requires companies to undergo changes almost constantly if they are to remain competitive. Students of organizational change identify areas of change in order to analyze them. A manager trying to implement a change, no matter how small, should expect to encounter some resistance from within the organization.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss organizational change and the management of that change. I will talk about the different drivers of change, the factors a leader needs to weigh to implement change effectively, the various resistances a leader may encounter while trying to implement change, and how various leadership styles will effect the realization of change. I will also discuss the knowledge I have gained through the completion of this assignment and how I think it might affect the way I manage change in my workplace.

Introducing organisational change is often hard, the main reasons for that can be variation in perceptions of the employees, fear of disruption or failure and underlining the right approach to apply change. Then even if the change in a specific organisation is projected successfully there is still lot to be done to manage it in an appropriate way (Oakland, 2007).

1.1 Change management is described by Armstrong (1) as “the process of achieving the smooth implementation of change by planning and introducing it systematically taking into account the likelihood of it being resisted”. Change, the fundamental constant in any successful organisation, can be adaptive, reconstructive, revolutionary or evolutionary and can happen for a number of diverse reasons:

In order to survive and prosper in a rapid changing environment of business world, organization is often required to generate fast response to changes (French, Bell & Zawacki, 2005). Change management means to plan, initiate, realize, control, and finally stabilize change processes on both, corporate and personal level. Change may cover such diverse problems as for example strategic direction or personal development programs for staffs. In this

However, people will not get out of their “comfort zone” without being motivated. This leads to the second error by leaders, which is not creating a powerful enough guiding coalition. Regardless of the size of the organization, the change effort should continually grow to include more and more people who believe that the changes are necessary (Kotter).

According to Kurt Lewin’s change model (1947), there are three aspects of managing organizational change: unfreezing, change intervention and refreezing. By observing the change model, all four characters are seen to go through the freezing stage when they found the first cheese station.

Companies and organizations are changing continually to be more efficient in what they do. Change is not always readily accepted. Many people like to stay where they are and become comfortable with their current position. Business writers and managers have stated that unless organizations continue to change, they will become stale and inefficient. There have been many change management initiatives such as Total Quality Management, Six Sigma, and the Japanese Kaizen. Although these initiatives carry different names and slightly different processes, they all have a few elements in common. The most important elements for successful change management, as emphasized by the course text Human Resources Management in Canada and John P. Kotter's

To foster innovation, the problems will be recognized, solutions will be provided, employee resistance will be broken down and employee empowerment will be promoted in order to provide incentives to achieve progress and effectively execute the innovation in order improve the group, people, organizational process and culture of the company.

For any business in the rapidly evolving world of business, planning and implementing successful organizational change is indispensable. Essentially, organizational change refers to a process whereby an organization strives to optimize performance in order to achieve its ideal state characterized by high performance and profitability (Côté & Mayhew, 2014). Any business would be more likely to lose its competitive edge, as well as fail to meet the demands of its loyal consumers if it doesn’t plan and implement change. Weiss (2012) emphasizes that all organizations ought to embrace change, and it’s imperative to note that successful organizational change doesn’t involve simple process of adjustments; instead it requires appropriate change management capabilities.

An organizational change is a process that manifests itself in all organizations in greater or lesser scale. It refers to the adaptive capacity of these organizations to the transformations of the environment in which they operate. Change involves a transition from the current situation to a different one, assuming a change of values, attitudes and behaviors. These changes will involve employees and managers to unlearn models and behaviors in order to learn new ones. The leader of the organization may encounter resistance and opposition from these groups and will have to deal with them using effective methods. For this reason, the leader must be aware of what causes resistance to change in an organization, this could be fear of the unknown, uncertainty, resistance to new experiences, changes in relationships, limited flexibility, or fear of failure. Effective communication reduces the interrogations and unfounded fears. The leader can provide all the necessary information and alternatives to the team so they will be allowed to gradually get used to the