MGMT 335 : Organizational Change Management : Performance in the Globa

Question: 

The process of change, is critical and challenging. It often requires substantial planning and application of resources to ensure that the organisation obtains an outcome consistent with the intended aims and objectives of the change program.
You are required to choose a case organisation you are familiar with, preferably one where you have currently or previously worked(You can take a case of any part time job as like restaurant, supermarket etc). You then need to identify a problem/issue/scenario that is problematic for this organisation. This issue needs to impact on the entire organisation or a substantial section of it. You are required to diagnose the scope, causes, effects and impacts of the change problem and then develop a change plan to resolve this problem.

Answer: 

Introduction: 

Concept of change 

Concept of change determines the situations where change is required for the objective of developing particular areas in terms of improving the performance. Requirement of change could be considered in any area in the organization because organizational performance is dependent on all departments’ functionalities, thus, it is required to determine the need for change in every sector through which relevant and desired goals could be accomplished. Process of change is challenging and critical because when change is implemented, lot of stakeholders gets affected and in relation to this, organization is required to take analyse the requirement of all those stakeholders with the objective of diagnosing change problems along with developing plans to implement sustainable and ethical change solutions. Thus, it could be said that nature of change is complex because it may create impact over the whole organization or at any one of the department of the organization (Hayes, 2018).

Identification of change 

I was working in the Amazon in the early 2000s and at that time, Amazon was at its growth stage as the company’s CEO was struggling hard to enhance its product offering along with the objective of setting up its presence in the global market. At that time, decisions of the organization were taken by the top level management only and they were following centralisation decision making process. Although, most of the companies were using this model for taking decisions but there were few also who moved towards decentralisation decision making process with recognising change in the external and global business scenarios (Stark, 2015).

Factors influencing change 

Intervention strategies for change 

Involving stakeholders in change management 

The issues faced by the Amazon was affecting the whole organizational functionalities due to which not only organizational performance was getting declined but at the individual level also, employees were not able to perform in an adequate manner as they were bound to work as per given guidelines without being creative or innovative (Cummings & Worley, 2014).

In relation to this, organizational top level management along with their CEO Jeff Bezos decided to adopt decentralisation technique and post-bureaucratic management approaches. Under these techniques, leader for every department was held responsible and accountable for their as well as for their team’s actions. In this manner, top level management could focus over other things such as adopting new measures to deal with the external affairs, making appropriate changes in the policies, strategies and standards to boost up the performance of the organization in order to generate opportunities to expand in the global market (Gray, et. al., 2018). Decentralisation technique has helped the employees to take their own decisions along with showcasing their talent in order to meet with different scenarios.

Organizational change model 

Kotter’s 8 Step Change Management Model 

• Create urgency: The first step for implementing change is to create urgency in terms of requirement of change. This could be done by showcasing facts and figures under which performance of the organization could be observed as declining. Apart from this, potential threats could also be analysed which could be occur in the near future due to non-implementation of change. Through this way, organization could be able to realise their stakeholders the requirement of change to deal with the threats along with gaining positive outcomes (Cameron & Green, 2015).
• Forming a powerful coalition: This step focuses on convincing all stakeholders which will be impacted by the implementation of change. This may also require strong leadership and management skills in order to take consent from all the stakeholders. Along with this, research will be conducted in relation to the requirement of change as well as to develop coordination amongst the teammates for working together towards implementation of change.
• Creating vision for change:While implementing change, numerous thoughts and ideas also generates with respect to the change in terms of dealing with the barriers and challenges faced by the organization. In this context, Amazon’s senior level management and Jeff Bezos, CEO of the organization clearly made their vision of adopting change in their decision making and management approaches so that employees’ talent and skills could be utilised for the attainment of desired goals and objectives (Doppelt, 2017).
• Communicate the vision:Amazon communicated their vision of implementation of change clearly with all their stakeholders through various communication tools. Communication act as the agent between the organizational thinking and stakeholders’ perception and this also helped the organization to address every stakeholder’s query in terms of taking their consent for implementation of change (Hickman & Silva, 2018).
• Remove obstacles:After communicating vision to the stakeholders, organization adopted all possible steps and strategies through which obstacles faced by the organization could be removed and this helped the organization to build confidence amongst the employees for moving forward to grab the opportunities (Clegg, Kornberger & Pitsis, 2015).
• Creating short-term wins: Before reaching to the desired destination, it is necessary to celebrate short term wins in terms of building confidence amongst the employees. This also helps the organization to motivate their employees for moving forward along with believing in the organizational vision to reach to the desired destination.
• Build on the change: This step focuses on analysing the short term wins as per the expectations in order to analyse whether organization is moving towards right track or not. If not, all previous steps needs to be analysed otherwise focus should be kept on attainment of further goals.
• Anchoring change:The final step described by Kotter is implementing change and anchoring the change as per the organizational standards and policies. Corporate culture needs to be addressed while implementing change with the objective of reaching towards the desired destination (Thompson, 2017).

Change plan

References: 

Chandra, S. and Kumar, K.N., 2018. Exploring Factors Influencing Organizational Adoption of Augmented Reality in E-Commerce: Empirical Analysis Using Technology-Organization-Environment Model. Journal of Electronic Commerce Research, 19(3).

Chang, J.F., 2016. Business process management systems: strategy and implementation. Auerbach Publications.

Gumz, A., Geyer, M. and Brähler, E., 2014. Psychodynamic therapy from the perspective of self?organization. A concept of change and a methodological approach for empirical examination. Clinical psychology & psychotherapy, 21(4), pp.299-310.

Hayes, J., 2018. The theory and practice of change management. Routledge.

Vachon, B., Foucault, M.L., Giguère, C.É., Rochette, A., Thomas, A. and Morel, M., 2018. Factors influencing acceptability and perceived impacts of a mandatory ePortfolio implemented by an occupational therapy regulatory organization. Journal of Continuing Education in the Health Professions, 38(1), pp.25-31.