CHANGE MANAGEMENT

Change Management

[Institution Name]

Change Management

Introduction

Organizations initiate change efforts for countless reasons. Failure to properly manage these changes can cause an organization to decline or even fail. Most organizations are faced with ongoing changes due to internal and external pressures. These pressures can lead to strategic changes that affect the entire organization or incremental changes that have a direct impact on a specific area. Given the economy today, organizations must continually scan their external business environment to maintain their competitive advantage by making internal adjustments.

Whenever you have change that moves employees from a known to an unknown state, you can best believe you will encounter resistance. Taking employees out of their comfort zone creates fear and uncertainty which results in resistance. Employees resist change for a number of reasons such as a lack of understanding around the change, personal conflicts, differing perceptions, mistrust, social disruption or the potential for loss on a personal level such as power, status and influence. Most of these barriers are a result of ineffective communication. Effective communication can be seen as the bloodline through a change process. Without it, you risk failure to your change initiative.

When a change initiative is undertaken, it's important the organization employ a change manager who is skilled and competent in change management. Change managers must be familiar with the various images of managing change and use one that's most appropriate for their change situation. They must adopt the use a change management model to guide the process. This paper assesses three change management models, each of which has components designed to engage employee involvement in the change process as a way of building excitement, motivation and overcoming resistance.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a broad overview of the concept of "Change Management." It is written primarily for all those people who are either implementing or undergoing some or other change in their professional or personal life. The paper also describes some of the strategies & tools that have been developed to assist the process of change management. Change management is critical to the survival and development organizations, they relate to changes more effectively, and the more likely they will succeed. CMC Limited (cmclimited.com) merged with TCS (tcs.com) and within this paper we will assess how the merger and acquisition principle brought about big change and apply the concepts of cultural change, structural change and leadership as well as resistance to change.

Initial Literature Review

The only constant thing in today's world is change. The size and scope of the 'change' being managed can be anything from a national level to an individual level. In this paper I am focusing mostly on Organizational level Change Management but at the same time I must say that the concept can relate to any scale with the minor variation & the process is interlinked which affects various levels. Some call it 'change management' others label it as 'continuous improvement', but the underlying idea is the same and finding opportunities to improve the organizations processes as a ...