ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE

Organizational Change



Organizational Change

Introduction

Since the economy began its decline, companies increasingly have turned to downsizing as a way to cut costs and remain competitive. While downsizing often can be an effective way to slash expenses, it is a complex one as well. Employers instituting layoffs face the considerable challenge of managing the legal aspects of the process while trying to help employees transition to new employment. Generally, employers are well aware of their obligations under the labor and employment laws that apply to layoffs. However, when organizations in the United States employ alien workers, the individuals responsible for managing layoffs often overlook the significant immigration-related consequences affecting both the employer and its foreign-national employees.

The most progressive design of the physical office is literally only a shell. The simple sociotechnical systems model that this physical and technological shell is entwined with tasks that are often rapidly changing; with organizational structures, formal and informal, that are increasingly fluid and involve many external partners; and with people, whose needs are also changing and extending, and many of whom are increasingly stressed as a result of their office work. (Drucker 2000, 12)

Organizational Structure and Business Process

Business process is performed by employees who are parts of formal or informal organizational structures. People may be organized in particular formal organizational units according to power, decision making, functional or other relationships. Formal organizational structures tend to be more stable than business processes because of legal relationships between employees and organization, which define their right to occupy a particular position in the organizational structure. The paper considers two issues of business process flexibility; first, the fit between organizational structure and organizational processes and, second, dynamic job assignment based on dynamic knowledge maps. Organizational structure usually is considered to be more stable than organizational processes. However changes in the processes can cause appearance of emergent organizational structures, which are more effective than formal ones. Business process model analysis is needed to identify when the formal structure is to be replaced by an emergent one. Dynamic knowledge map is changed each time a person performs some new task in the process. This allows to track experience of employees and thus to base job assignments on up-to-date information about their knowledge. (Achrol 2002, 12)

From the point of view of business process modelling, at high level of abstraction, an organizational structure may be viewed in two ways: (Norton 2006, www.sage.com )

(1) as a part of a business process, i.e., it may be included in the business process as one of the attributes (Fig. 1a) or

(2) as the environment of the business process (Fig. 1b). At lower levels of abstraction only parts of organisational structure may be considered as parts of business sub-processes (Fig. 2). Thus, formally, in a flexible business process, organisational structure and relationship Performs between business process and organisational structure (Fig. 1 b) have to embrace timely change when it is requested by changes in the business process. Therefore a possibility to reflect views a and b ...