Organizational Change and Transation.doc

school of managementassessment/assignment submission sheetstudents full name (in block capitals): hong chenid numbers: 322779841name of programme: msc human resource managementcourse name: organizational change and transformationcourse code:mang 6150course lecturer: professor malcolm higgsrequired submission: thursday, february 12th 2009title of paper: how should an organisation approach the implementation of a significant change and what are the advantages and disadvantages of your suggested approach. it is important that you justify your answer by reference to theories, and recent developments in thinking, relating to organisational change.surviving in the globalization environment and the fierce competition, the contemporary organisations are facing with challenges and sustaining with great pressures. in order to overcome the difficulties, the organisation should be changed to be more flexible and efficient. it is not a simplistic way to approach the goal because organisational change is a complex process (senge, 1999). therefore, it is a better way to solve this problem by combining the application of hrd within organisation and appropriate change approach based on theories. according to rowland fisher lexon (rflc) change quadrant (2003), there are mainly divided into four categories of change approaches, namely are directive approach, master approach, self assembly (diy) approach and emergence approach. each approach has different advantages and limitations. thus, it is vital to opt for the suitable approach during the organisational change. in addition, organisational change is part of organisation development. from the perspective of organisation development, it is the right orientation for the organisation to change.change is a pervasive influence. it is an inevitable part of both social and organisation life and everything is subject to continual change for development (mullins, 2007). there are several elements forcing the organisation to change, such as: the uncertain economic conditions require the organisation to prepare for the emergency; the globalisation environment and fierce worldwide competition is the chiefly external factors for organisation to change; speedy developments in the new technology and the information era require the organisation to be flexible to update; the level of government intervention, political interests and scarcity of natural resources should be also considered to the forces of change. thus, change is inescapable. therefore, it is necessary to follow some theories to manage change.organizational change mainly related to three theories which are contingency theory, complexity theory and business process reengineering theory. contingency theory considers that the status and the process of the organisation should be changed with the internal and external needs and requirements (vecchio, 2000). the core thought of contingency theory is that managers should respond to circumstances and variables immediately according to organisational internal and external conditions. the application of information technology has changed the business administration in all aspects of the original pattern. in the new form, in order to improve management efficiency, the managers should run business procedure reengineering by adjusting and changing the management model and methods with innovation. additionally, the essence of contingency theory is change. the critical key is whether managers keenly observe the changes in both internal and external organisational environment which have impact on all aspects of business, and then carry out innovating for management ways and means.according to contingency theory, organisations should be an organic organisational structure rather than a decisive mechanical structure (lynch, 2006). that is to say, organisations mission is to be determined by the organisational context, and gradually clears up during the process of interaction between workers. in addition, individuals responsibility is not fixed, but extensive. with regard to communication in the organisation, the communication via the horizontal direction is overweight the vertical direction. moreover, for democratic atmosphere of organisation, information transmission and advice are more than a rigid command. furthermore, general purpose and mission of organisations not only accomplish by the technical means, but also by the expertise and experience of the workers. contingency theory focuses on changes and revolutions, and always asked managers and staff of organisations to maintain a positive attitude and thoughts to cope with change instead of being passive to transform.complexity theory suggests that business organisation is a complex, open, and dynamic organic system of life (reynolds, 1987). in order to be survival and development, organisation must be continuously carried out exchanging energy, material and information with the external environment. then, under certain conditions, organisation states in the edge of chaos which means that organisation is a dynamic open systems far from equilibrium. additionally, there is a nonlinear interactive phenomenon existing among the organisational internal factors. therefore, in the complex environments, organisation occurs from the effect of self-organisation, from disorder to order, from lower order to higher order, to make it change and revolute continuously and systematically, and then emerge new structure and morphology of dynamic equilibrium.for the complexity of organisation theory, only in adaptive external environment can organisation proceeds evolution and development (litchenstein, 1996). organisational adaptability and evolution are a symbiosis, and businesss capability and intelligence of self-organizing change is its driving force. there are three ways demonstrating the symbiosis. first of all, the organisation can do self-remodel through various departmental working group. these horizontal structures require extensive cross-functional and multi-disciplinary internal connective capacity. secondly, the organisation employs internal prices, markets and similar with market mechanisms to coordinate the group complexity. third, organisation has also established some sort of partnership to ensure making up for its scarce ability.as far as business process reengineering (bpr) theory considered by hammer and champy (2001), the current organizational structure is like a pyramid, which is not just bloated in size and complex and inefficient for internal structure. in this way, business often ignore the customers, resulting in the value chain confusion, cannot bring value-added to customers. business process reengineering theory considers that such organizational process must be reengineering to achieve making organization face the customer directly, and aim to meet the needs and desires of customers.the core of business process reengineering is business process change. according to hill and collins (1998), there are two aspects included into its thoughts. first of all, through the original business process re-shaping, covering the corresponding with resources structural adjustment and human resource restructuring, it can make business a great advancement which can be seen on numerous critical key indicators, such as the level of profitability, productivity, product research and development capacity and speed, as well as customer satisfaction. eventually, the goal is to raise the overall competitiveness of business. secondly, through the re-shaping of enterprise business process, business gets a good deal of improvement on performance. the most important thing is that enterprise business process enables organizational form bring out revolutionary change. it will transform business into a flow-oriented enterprise, resulting in realizing fundamental reform of business operating methods and management practices.base on the theories above, there are many organisation change models arising to guide the management of change. among these models, lewins change model (lewin, 1951) is perhaps the most influential model of organizational change. stacey (1996) argues that this model is based on assumption as follow: the first is that the managers are able to select successful transformations before environment changes; the second is that change is a linear process and last is that organisations are systems keeping stable equilibrium. however, in recent years, facing with so many uncertain factors, majority of managers fail to do it in advance of environment change. in addition, it is proved that change is not a linear process but a complex process (pascale, 1999). what is more, the organisation is a dynamic system rather than a stable equilibrium one. although these assumptions are not adapt to the contemporary situation, even opposite to, the critical thinking of dividing the change process into three stages are easy to mange change and execute the organisation approach. lewin (1951) proposes that three-phase model of organizational change which contains unfreeze, mobilise, re-freeze has plans for interpretation and guidance on how to launch, manage and stabilize change processes. the focus of unfreeze lies in the motivation to create change. encouraging staff to change existing patterns of behaviour and work attitude, adopting new organizational strategies to become accustomed to the development of behaviour and attitudes. in order to achieve this, on one hand, it is needed to be negative of old behaviour and attitudes; on the other hand, it is necessary to make employees recognize the urgency of change. comparative assessment can be used to approach, the overall state of the unit, cooperating indicators and the level of performance or with other competitors to be compared to identify gaps. helping the staff to change their thinking, unfreeze existing attitudes and behaviour, pressing for change, willing to accept the new work pattern. in addition, attention should be paid to create an open atmosphere and psychological sense of security in order to decrease the psychological barriers to change, enhance the confidence of a successful transformation. mobilise is a learning process, it is necessary to provide employees not only new information, new modes of behaviour and new perspective, but also to specify the direction of change, implementing change to form new attitudes and behaviours. in order to consolidate the new attitudes and behaviour, it is important to set a paradigm, using role models, mentoring, expert lectures, group training and so on. lewin (1951) believes that change is a cognitive process, which is completed by the attainment of new concepts and information. in the re-freezing stage, it is essential to strengthen the new attitude and behaviour, so that organizational change can be kept in a stable state. in order to ensure stability, it is considerable for the staff to have the opportunity to attempt and trial new attitude and behaviour, and timely positive enhancement. meanwhile, it is encouraged to strengthen the stability of behaviour change groups to form a stable of long-term group behaviour. in recent years, the importance of hrd is increasing and it related to the organisational change deeply. many experts extend the term training and development (t&d) at work and adopt the term hrd instead. according to swanson and holton (1997), hrd refers to a process of developing and or unleashing individual expertise via organisational development and personnel training and development with the aim of enhancing performance. additionally, stewart et al. (2002) expand upon, the philosophy of hrd is human resource development encompasses activities and processes which are intended to have impact on organisational and individual learning. in terms of the feature of definition in hrd is the extent to which organisational change is owing to the interventions during the learning process. obviously, hrd is not merely a new term for training and development (t&d). furthermore, it is also including organisation development and learning, especially strategic learning methods in organisations. there are wide scopes of hrd activities, covering training, employee development, organisation development and learning, and so on. through these activities, the change approach can be delivered from individual to the group, then from the group to other groups, until the whole organisation. it is a great drive force to the organisational change.organisation change is one of the critical features in the organization development (od), the relationship between od and change is emphasised by hamlin, keep, and ash (2001), and it is considered that for organisation to manage change effectively, change becomes the driving force to the future success and growth. in these organisations, every change becomes welcomed as an opportunity for increasing efficiency and improving new organisational structure. organisation development has emerged both from the demands of a changing environment and from knowledge provided by the evolution of the applied behavioural science (friedlander and brown, 1974). organisation development is a field of applied behavioural science that seeks to develop the principles and practice of managing change and improving effectiveness in organisations. according to french and bell (1999), organisation development is a long-term effort led and supported by top management, to improve an organisations visioning, empowerment, learning, and problem-solving processes, through an ongoing, collaborative management of organisational culture-with special emphasis on the consultant-facilitator role and the theory and technology of applied behavioural science, including participant action research. before executing the change approach, organisational diagnosis should be carried out first. it could determine the appropriate interventions to organisations. the purpose of organisational diagnosis is to understand the nature and causes of problems and compare the present condition with a future or preferred present. in addition, the main characteristic of organisational diagnosis interventions is chosen which may target members, behaviours and processes, organisational structures, organisational goals, strategies and cultures. in order to bring about effective change, od makes use of an amount of interventions. french and bell (1999) define organisation development interventions as a range of planned programmatic activities clients and consultants participate in during the course of an organisation development programme, such as team building activities, survey research and feedback, t-group, inter-group activities and so on. team building is the process of estimating task procedures and patterns of human interaction within a work group. porras and berg (1978) observe that team building is one of the most commonly used organization development interventions. it is great help for team members to interact and share idea and skills. the primary objective of team-building activities is to improve the whole organisation performance by increasing the effectiveness of work teams. the survey research and feedback contains the use of questionnaire to help determine the attitudes of members to the functioning of the organisation. then the outcome of the research will be sent to the top management and the group for analysis. all of the group members discuss to find out the problem and solve the problems. however, the limitation of this approach is the difficult of the propriety questionnaire designed. besides, the quality of feedbacks is hard to ensure. t-group (training group) is a natural method of sensitivity training. cooper and mangham (1971) define it as an approach to human relations training which provides participants with an opportunity to learn more about themselves and their impact on others, especially to learn how to operate more efficiently in face to face circumstances. feedback to the value and effectiveness of t-group training are very diverse. the experience can be dissatisfaction and disturbing, especially for some individuals. t- group training is difficult to evaluate objectively and there is still a main problem which is the result of training transfer. however, mckenna (1994) suggests that participation in the t- group training does enhance interpersonal skills, encouraging change and guide to more release communications and more flexible behaviour. in addition, it possibly results in a change of behaviour but it is not always clear link to the improvement of organisational performance.many organisations tend to manage change and improve organisations performance through organisation development interventions. however, there are some limitations of organisation development. the conflicts between organisational goals and individuals goals are hard to reconcile. organisation development interventions could not effectively resolve the conflicts between organisational goals and individuals goals. moreover, individuals negative attitudes are inevitable. it is possible that some of team members who have negative attitudes and they are not willing to participate in organisation development interventions. nevertheless, od interventions are some better approach to manage change.from a number of authors contribute to the four categorisations change approaches, the characters of them are indicated as follow: directive approach is tightly controlled with small range of interventions and based on simple theory of change while change is being driven, controlled and managed (kotter, 1995). on the contrast, master approach is an explicit project management with wide range of interventions and based on complex theory of change. extensive engagement which influences