Adedeji Awolesi

Awolesi Adedeji Israel

There is nothing permanent in life except change. It is said that change is constant in life, in our lives and it forms an integral process in the development of our lifecycle, that’s why it can never be referred as something new (Mullins, 2010). We live in a world that is continually changing. There is climate change, cultural change, globalisation, management change and as leaders, we need to understand change in an organisation and how it affects behaviour change of people in the organisation.

Change in management is the continual renewal of organisational structure, capabilities and direction to satisfy the needs of customers (Moran and Brightman, 2001). Change is ever present in an organisational feature either strategically or operationally (Burnes, 2004), moreover, organisation need to identify what needs is and manage changes required to get results. According to Mullins (2010), it takes some people to thrive on new challenge and adapt to change while some will resist and rebel to change but it takes a valid organisational framework to implement and manage organisational change (Balogun and Hope, 2004).

Myron E. Ullman (CEO) of JC Penny found it challenging in changing the culture of the organisation due to the company’s rigidness, formality, tradition for centuries and employees behaviour to change but he was successful in changing organisation framework by focusing on changing company’s strategy, training of top managers and employees, ‘name’ initiative in the organisation, team building and winning spirit and incentive for employees. This initiative from the CEO increased motivation of the employees which had impact on sales of the company’s product, increased profit and more retail outlets being opened.

Employees can resist changing due to variety of reasons. Some believe that managers are not capable to manage change, some lack faith in ability to learn new skills to adjust to change, some feel there will be loss of authority or control and some feel the organisation is not entitled to the extra effort like in the case of JC Penny but more to this lies deep in individual persons (Allan, 2013). It works through their individual physiological change process which might create fear, anger or frustration but a manager can manage change resistance based on Kurt Lewin’s Force Field Analysis (Businessperform, 2003).

In Bp, decisions are being taken from the top management which is being implemented by managers in different departments in the organisation. Where there is any external occurrence which causes drastic change in the organisation like the Gulf of Mexico oil spill which had a lot of impact in the organisation, Bob Dudley (CEO) follows this same process and encourages individual thinking from the employees in the strategic direction of the company which helps in growth and sustainability preview of the company (Bp, 2013)

In conclusion, it is evident that change affects every organisation therefore management of organisation has to be reactive in implementing a valid framework in managing change in their organisation and in order to construct framework, it is recommended that exploratory studies of change and how it is being managed should be conducted because Balogun and Hope (2004), report seventy per cent of failure rate of programme change initiated.

References

Allan, L. 2013. Managing work in a workplace.

Balogun, J. and Hope, V. (2004) Exploring Strategic Change, 2nd edn (London: Prentice Hall)

Bp. 2013. Sustainability | BP Global. [Online] Available at: http://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/sustainability.html [Accessed: 8 Sep 2013].

Businessperform. 2003. Employee Resistance to Change. [Online] Available at: http://www.businessperform.com/change-management/resistance_to_change.html [Accessed: 8 Sep 2013].

Moran, J. W. and Brightman, B. K. (2001) ‘Leading organizational change’, Career Development International, 6(2), pp. 111–118.

Mullins, L.J. (2010) Management and Organisational Behaviour, London: Pearson Higher Education

Timrayner. 2008. Heraclitus on change. [Online] Available at: http://philosophyforchange.wordpress.com/2008/04/07/heraclitus-on-change/ [Accessed: 7 Sep 2013].