CHANGE MANAGEMENT

Change Management



Organizational Culture and Change Management

Introduction

Corporate business environment is becoming more and more globalized, by extending their relationships with international companies. Hence, in order to build high performing organizations managers need to know how to effectively manage organizational changes and understand the relationship between organizational culture, national culture and organizational change. When an organization's culture impacted by the wider societal values and understandings, it may exacerbate the degree of resistance to change as such values and understandings cannot be changed easily because of their societal roots and socio-dynamic nature (Huff, 2003, 12).

Organizations require more of their technical experts to consolidate their technical and practical mastery, and build an arsenal of tools and techniques around them to lead to significant behavioural change and organizational improvement for the new business models in all sectors (Huff, 2003, 12).

Organizational Culture

According to Schein (1985), the term "culture" should be renewed for the deeper level of basic assumptions and beliefs that shared by members of an organization, that operate unconsciously, and that define in a basic "taken-for-granted" fashion an organization's view of it and its environment. These assumptions and beliefs learned responses to a group's problems of survival in its external environment and its problems of internal integration. They come to be taken for granted because they solve those problems repeatedly and reliably. This deeper level of assumptions is to be distinguished from the "artefacts" and "values' that are of manifestations or surface levels of the culture but not the essence of the culture (Brown, 2004, 34).

Culture should be viewed as a property of an independently defined stable social unit. That is, if one can demonstrate that a given set of people have shared a significant, number of important experiences in the process of solving external and internal problems, one can assume that such common experiences have led them, over time, to a shared view of the world around them and their place in it. There has to be enough experience shared to have led to a shared view, and this shared view has to have worked for long enough to come to be taken for granted and to have drop out of awareness. Culture in this sense is a learned product of group experience and is, therefore, to be found only where there is a definable group with a significant history (Brown, 2004, 34).

Organizational Changes: Success Rates

The changes in organizational life range from routine operational improvements to significant, radical, transformational changes. Examples of the latter include business mergers and acquisitions, business (territorial) expansions, cultural changes, management information system (MIS) implementation, enterprise resources planning (ERP) implementation, process improvement or re-engineering; and restructuring of organizational units, such as downsizing, technology changes, Total Quality Management (TQM) driven changes; and development of new business strategies. Moreover, business and professional publications report that over 40% of organizational changes encompass different categories, which makes the process of organizational change management both complex and complicated (Brown, 2008, 78).

Simultaneously, according to various studies, organizational change attempts repeatedly fail, which ...