ASSIGNMENT

Element 1: Individual/Personal Change



Element 1: Individual/Personal Change

Introduction

According to Pettigrew et.al, (2001, p.698-699) nearly two decades ago, the concept and practice of organizational change was not common. It was only in the mid 1990's that organizations and researchers began to study their change process analytically. Therefore, this study of the change process accompanied understanding the context, processes and the content of the changes being implemented by the organization together. Similarly, with the passage of time these processes changed to include innovation and strategy within its dimension. Coupled with, the fact that organization's undertaking change implementation process, need to address its key stakeholders regarding the change process. Failure to communicate or gain effective participation from any one of these stakeholders' could hamper the change process. Likewise, one of these key stakeholders includes the organization's employees.

Conversely, the main research question that this paper seeks to address is what happens to an organization if individuals do not change as part of an organizational change process? Likewise, for ease of discussion, this paper highlights the different impacts on an organization as a result of failure to engage its internal stakeholder's in the organizational change process. This would include studying the affect on the change process in case of resistance being shown by the employees of an organization. The latter would be discussed in light of few hypothetical organizational change scenarios to understand what measures the management could have taken to avoid employee resistance to change, in the following segment of the paper.

Discussion

It is essential to discuss certain key concepts relevant to this paper first. These are discussed as follows:

Organizational Change

According to Rouse (2009) organizational change is a framework for managing and implementing new changes. This includes changes such as new business processes or cultural changes in the organizational structure of a firm. The main intention behind an organizational change is to upgrade and better the operational functions of an organization, which would lead to an increase in its profitability and performance levels.

Organizational Change Process

According to Weiner (2009) organizational change process involves of many phases and levels of successfully introducing, implementing and obtaining outcomes of the changes in an organization. Moreover, regardless whether the change being implemented is small or large, the change management team must understand the different phases of the change process and plan strategies accordingly. Conversely, this also highlights the concept of an organization's readiness to change. This concept mandates that unless the organization and its stakeholders and willing to adopt or welcome the planned changes, the management would encounter hindrances to this process.

Resistance to Change

As a fundamental concept in this paper, Bateh et.al, (2013) describes resistance to change coming from the core stakeholder's of any organization; its employees. This stakeholder group because of lack of knowledge and motivation may perceive the planned changes by the senior management as unnecessary. This results in a fall in performance of the employees and the company's overall productivity. In addition, resistance to change amongst the employees also incurs out of fear that they might lose ...