CHANGE MANAGEMENT

Managing change in the organization

Managing Change in the Organization

Introduction

Change in today's organizations is occurring at a staggering rate. Often the responsibility to manage that change falls to the internal organization development or training professionals. This responsibility can be overwhelming, particularly without a change model or process in place. With mindful planning, however, there are a host of tools and techniques that can be applied to change initiatives to facilitate the management process. Keys for successful change management include thinking holistically to understand all of the change implications, focusing on the critical success factors that facilitate implementation, and striving to be an equal partner with the businesses implementing change (Scott, 2004).

The existing organizational arrangements consists of (strategies, structures, systems, cultures, etc, and/or processes (planning, coordination, decision making, etc.) Again, however, a constructionist and discursive orientation frames that understanding in a more nuanced way than "conventional" usage. For example, the assertion that something is "an existing arrangement" is itself a discursive account that frames something in a particular way and for particular purposes (Thatchenkery, 2006).

Consequently, organizational change involves both "things" and the discursive "accounts" of those things in recursive relationships, Changed actions therefore can lead to changes in conversation and changed conversation can lead to changed behaviors. As valuable as these studies are in highlighting the significance of organizational discourse in relation to organizational change, they tend to focus on separate or segmented aspects of discourse and change rather than providing or suggesting a more encompassing understanding of the multiple dimensions and their interrelationships. Until more integrated approaches or frameworks are available, it therefore seems likely that discursive studies of organizational change will remain a relatively underutilized avenue of enquiry and that their potential contribution to understanding the processes and practices of organizational change will not be fully realized. Most discursive studies of organizations contribute to understanding organizational phenomena in two significant respects (Shaw, 2002).

The approach to organizational phenomena is more than a focus on language and its usage in organizations. Consequently, demonstrating the role of power in establishing or challenging prevailing discourses is important to understanding organizational change. Four concepts are critical to our discourse-based framework's capacity to explain organizational change; discourse, text, context, and conversation. Discourse is instantiated in the daily communicative practices that are integral to social interaction and thus social structure (Van de Ven, 2005). That is, they shape meaning, persuade others, legitimate interests, and reproduce social structure. The implication of this approach is that when analyzing discourse researchers and change agents one should aspire to pay greater attention to the complex relationships among sets of texts and the various devices within these texts that describe and constitute organizational realities.

Discussion

Managing Organizational Change

Change management can be divided into two stages. First, we need to change the plan and agree the people who will carry out these changes. At this stage the key role played by the leadership. The second phase - a change management projects. At this point we should focus on methods of ...