Introduction
Currently, the economic pressures and changing political priorities allow the need for organisational change in the public and private bodies (Bauer, 2008). However, carrying out changes in an organisation is a complex process that can lead to negative and positive outcomes, thus it is important to concentrate on accessible evidence that would make the process effective and efficient. Change is considered a multi-level phenomenon. There is a gap on the literature regarding to management change in administration perceptive. Management literatures provide a number of cases of sectoral and organisational in the public sector (Sminia and Van, 2006). This indicates the relevance of exploring a number of literatures to determine the nature and range of evidence that is based on the change within public sector. This paper establishes an exclusive literature review that will provide evidence related to organisational management change (Fernandez and Rainey, 2006). This paper will explore some examples of organisational change, factors that leads to resistance to change before looking at the psychological contract concept of change. The paper will also set out research on sustainability of change and psychological change theories before concluding by exploring a number of literatures to determine in detail information on management change.
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Due to the technological development witnessed today, change is becoming an acceptable work practise in organisational life. Although a good number of organisations appreciate the need to change, most of the changes made do not achieve the intended purpose (Battaglio and Condrey2009). With the need for organisational change, various body of literature are exploring the concept of management of organisational change and the factors that may contribute to its success. One of the most sorts out perspectives of managing organisational change is called ‘planned approaches’ to change developed by Lewin. In the literature, the Lewin argues that change should involve three stages: doing away with current behaviour, making a decision to move to a new behaviour and adapting to anew behaviour. These three steps have been used for years to understand the concept of organisational change.
Over the years, the theory has been reviewed and changes made to divide the stages into more specific processes. For instance, a four stage process incorporating assessment, planning, action and incorporation was developed from the three stage processes by Bullock and Batten. However, the three stage processes for understanding organisational change by Lewin was criticised for being grounded on small samples and its assumptions that organisations make decision under perpetual conditions that can be changed and planned for. Due to the many criticisms, the theory was replaced by another concept of organisational change called ‘emergent approach’. The emergent approach to organisation change considers change as a rapid and unpredictable outcome that cannot be controlled from the top down. The approach also considers change as an alerting process where businesses respond to environmental changes. The emergent approach is focused on facilitating for change than giving planned steps for initiatives.
A number of proponents of the emergent approach suggest a layout of actions organisations should follow in maximizing the possibility of change being successful (Rusaw, 2007). Such actions include, empowering employees, developing visions, establishing strong leadership etc. (Fernandez and Rainey, 2006). An assumption developed for the emergent approach is that, for an organisation to respond to a change, the managers must critically understand the structure of the organisation, its strategies, culture etc. Understanding all this enables the managers to select the best approach to change and factors that may create barriers in the process. However, the emergent theory has faced a number of critics. Critics question the usefulness of action sequences, and their bids to inimitable organisational contexts (Holbeche, 2009). Some theorists suggest the implementation of amore ‘contingency’ and ‘situational’ approach, disputing that the productivity of an organisation depends heavily on situational variables. However, these theories have been criticised for exaggerating the role of situational variables and establishing that there lack a role for managers of business organisations.
The Psychological Contract
The psychological contract was established by a theorist called Rousseau as a belief based on the terms of a relationship between parties. Within the environment of work, psychological contract refers to the assumed balance between how a worker is treated by the leader, and what he or she puts in to the work. In addition to provision of remuneration by employers, worker’s concept of psychological contract include the provision of factors such as training, job security, and work-life balance in exchange for their hard work, loyalty and innovation from them. Research evident has discovered a positive relationship between an assumption of an equilibrium psychological contract and workers’ commitment to the business organisation. However a negative relationship was discovered with the abandonment of job duties and turnover intensions. Psychological contract has an advantage of being twofold. To begin with, the information of the contract is unwritten and informal. Therefore, both the employer and employee may have different views on the information of the contract and the level to which a task has to be fulfilled by the two parties.
For instance, a study conducted by Kessler showed that managers hard positive attitudes towards the assessment of the employer’s accomplishment of their task more than the employees. Creating an open environment and open communication channel, the manager is able to clarify the expectations of the employees and employers (Hill and Hupe. 2009). The openness based on the psychological contracts is important in the duration of change, especially when employees worry that psychological contract change may be negative. Another way that shows the usefulness of psychological contract in organisational change is the fact that managers are able to consider the equilibrium of the contract. Thus, if an employer implements a change that is expected to affect the obligations of the employee, for instance change increasing working hours, they should contemplate on changing what they give to the employees to maintain an exclusive balance, for instance increased flexibility.
Types of Change
Every change needs a unique strategy to be implemented in order to provide effective functionality. Three major types of changes include, developmental change, transformational change and transitional a change.
Development Change
This type of change takes place when an organisation makes some improvement to the existing business strategies and structure. Organisations implement developmental changes in their business system in order to remain competitive (Kickert, 2010). This change affects the employees and thereby it lead to their re-education and re-training. Major changes in the organisation such as closing division negatively affect the employees. The employees could perceive that the organisation tried other options before considering closing the division.
Transitional Change
This type of change is considered more intrusive than developmental change. It involves replacing current organisational processes with new processes. The phase between changing from existing process to a new process is referred to as translational period. Business merger, new product development, corporate reorganisation and installation of new technology are some of the examples of translational changes. Translational change adds tension between the employees and is difficult to implement than development changes. Translational changes create personal insecurity and therefore employees’ education and training should be carried out immediately.
Transformational Change
This type of change takes place after transition period. It constitutes both development change and transitional change. When an organisation is faced with rampant technological evolutions, important changes involving supply and demand, lack of revenue, increased competition etc., cannot be resolved by developmental or transitional changes. Instead the organisation may be forced to carry out transformational changes.
Resistance to change
The success of an organisational change is attributed to its acceptance by the employees. According to Keebler-Ross, people go through five different stages of ‘grief’ in an event of change or loss. These five stages: “denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance” can apply to the management of organisational changes. After implementation of a change is delivered, workers should be given time to tackle their denial. Once they have received the information about change, they undergo a period of bargaining and dejection and thus require support to get through it all. Other employees take a different approach when it comes to change. According to Shaul Oreg, the resistance to change relies on personality and the situation in which the change takes place (Oreg, 2006). He developed and verified ‘Resistance to Change scale’ that was conceptualized as a firm personality characteristic. In the study, Shaul found that there was a significant relationship between a people’s Resistance to Change Score and behavioural resistance organisational change they experienced. The study also showed that variable factors affected the employees’ resistance to change. Trust in management played significant role in affecting behavioural and cognitive resistance.
Many management organisational change literature mention methods of reducing resistance to change (Klarner, Probst and Soparnot. 2008). One of the strategies mentioned is the involvement of employees in the organisational change. However, employee’s participation in making change alone is not enough since managers should lay a crucial role in motivating and fulfilling innovation and supporting organisational change. Kotter and Schlesinger developed an emergent approach to overcoming the resistance to change. These theorists proposed that the nature and content of the change vary tremendously between organisations and each organisation should come up with appropriate response. Schlesinger and Kotter stated that appropriate factors such as education, negotiation, direct participation and training can reduce resistance to change in any organisation.
Implementing and Sustaining Change
Implementation is described as the internalisation and execution of a change immediately it is accepted by individuals in an organisation and a verdict is made to accept the change and integrate it in the business activities (Chustz and Larson, 2006). Implementation of new practices may bring organisational change (Wiggins, 2009). However sustaining such changes is a hard task. Therefore sustaining change is an important component in organisational management change. There are factors that affect sustainability of organisational change. Such factors include leadership, political power, managerial style, cultural perceptions and project management structures (Lindquist, 2006).
Behavioural Change Literature
Concept of behavioural change approach states that it can prove to be difficult to make people change their everyday behaviour even if the change would bring benefits to the individual. Behavioural change shows that resistance to change can exist even when the leaders in organisations address existing concerns. Behavioural change model developed by Bagozzi shows that there are a number of factors that affects the capabilities of a subject to change that surpass their couscous thought processes (Darnton, 2008). Additionally, other factors like degree to which an individual believe in possibility of a specific change and the degree to which a particular behaviour is desirable, will impact the intention to change regardless of personal feeling.
Conclusion
This paper has reviewed some organisational change literatures. According to the paper, although it is possible to plan and introduce change in an organisation, it is paramount to note that employees sometimes perceive themselves to be operating within a constant environment. However, this does not necessarily mean that change cannot be implemented. It illustrates the importance of having an idea of other changes that occur in the process that can over whelm particular change. According to this literature review, change is a continuous process that incorporates different steps. Therefore, managers are required to choose a strategy based on communication, training, education, etc., that incorporate very well to the different stages of change instead of choosing a single approach for change. In addition, managers should put in mind the nature and content of psychological contract the firm has with the workers and how a specific change might impact its equilibrium. If the balance is changed or altered, managers are responsible for rebalancing it in order to avoid resistance to changes. Other factors also can result to resistance to organisational change and should be taken into account. Managers who consider implementing organisational change are advised to be more aware of organisational change literatures since they would provide in depth information on how to go about it. We have also seen that organisational changes take different forms and are classified as transformational, transitional and developmental.
References
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