Introduction
Managing change within an organization can be a challenging endeavor. Generally, the larger and longer existing an organization and its practices have been, the harder it would be to implement a proposed set of changes. In this paper, the author assumes the role of a consultant team leader who is working on a client organization’s planned organizational change management. The objective of the present paper is to be able to discuss the different theoretical and operational issues involved in the lead up to the planned change management scenarios.
Main Theoretical Perspectives on Leadership and their Relevance to Organizational Change
The way how the subtitle for this section was phrased implies that two variables, namely leadership and organizational change, are directly correlated. When it comes to change management, it would be fairly safe to suggest that they are indeed correlated. In order to understand how, it would be important to operationally define each of the said variables first.
Organizational change management refers to any set of processes that involve the transitioning of individuals, teams, departments, and subsidiaries, and entire organizations towards newer environments. The aim of the planned transitions varies . Often they are intended to:
Change the way how the organization’s resources are spent
Change the way how the employees are trained
Change the way how the operations are managed
One thing that is common among all forms of organizational change is that their ultimate goal which is to restructure the company. In most cases, a management team that is yearning for a real organizational change recognizes that there is a need for certain restructuring. However, a common dilemma is the lack of awareness or knowledge about the events that could happen in the future as a result of the said restructuring.
This is not surprising at all considering that business foresight can only reach so far. Predicting the events that are going to happen in the future as a result of the change management is, oftentimes, going to be fruitless because a mathematical or business model that can enable management team members to do so is yet to exist—i.e. it is impossible.
This is the main reason why most contemporary change management procedures are focused on the effects of the processes that are needed to create a successful organizational transition. This is essentially the opposite of change management by foresight.
This is because the people managing the change would focus on how they can take partial if not full control of the effects of the organizational transition. In most cases, they would have to make a lot of observations and evaluations because there exists no way for them to fully and accurately predict how the members of a team, department, or an entire organization would react, including the extent and other variations, when certain organizational changes have already been implemented.
However, it is important to note that enough attention should still be placed on the use of theoretical perspectives that may help them anticipate and therefore prepare for negative change management-related reactions from the organization’s stakeholders. A change management process that involves requiring employees at all levels to increase the level of detail of their company document transcription (i.e. documentation), for example, would draw the ire of many employees, especially the senior ones who are so used to the status quo.
In such a scenario, it would be logical to anticipate that there would be a certain level of resistance to change and to conduct preparation programs for it early on than to be overly optimistic and assume that all of the employees are going to adhere without putting up a certain level of resistance. In this example scenario, chances are some of the employees are indeed going to express their dissatisfaction over the new changes and may even resist and then fight back.
Then again, this is where the ability of the change managers to anticipate potential roadblocks would be useful. A handy backup plan in this example scenario would be the use of operant conditioning (i.e. positive and negative reinforcement through rewards and punishments) to remind the organizational stakeholders about who are in charge and their role as members to accept and adhere to the new changes.
Leadership plays an important role in the management of organizational change. It is worth iterating that the goal of change management is to make improvements within the organization. Change-related processes often target the people, their skills, and behaviors.
These, according to psychology-related literatures about change management, are among the hardest to change, especially once they have already set in as part of a long term and in some cases, permanent status quo . The leaders who are implementing the proposed changes should be willed and motivated enough to overcome the stresses and resistance, among other things, that are associated with such a tough project.
Naturally, the bigger the proposed changes are, the harder it is going to be for the change management leaders to implement them. According to a study published in the Journal of Change Management about the impacts of leadership, values, and ethics on change management outcomes, the skills and competencies of a leader are going to have a significant impact on how certain parts or the entire change management program is going to be concluded.
What the authors in that study highlighted was the promotion of the ethical dimension of change. What made them highlight this was the notion that ethical change management leadership can serve as an effective means of ensuring that both the leaders and their followers would act in the interest of the many rather than the few .
This may be done in a lot of ways; for which, the example they used was the use of the skills of a charismatic and transformational leader. According to the authors, transformational-charismatic leaders tend to be better when it comes to the implementation of good changes because of their often clear and transparent system of ethics and accountability .
Analyze the Theories of Organizational Culture and their Impact on Change
Every organization is unique. Each has its own organizational culture. An organizational culture refers to the collective image that the organization’s members’ values, behaviors, and ideas create. It is also an organization’s culture that determine how positive or negative its psychological, social, and overall working environment is going to be for its stakeholders.
There are other components that may affect an organization’s culture. This may include preferred management and leadership styles, type of employees, dominant national culture, and the social constructs within the organization, among others. There are numerous ways how to interpret the original theory of organizational culture. These, interpretations, however, have one common denominator. Basically, the theories of organizational culture all suggest that an organization does not have many cultures; rather it only has one.
This can be a useful piece of information when it comes to the goal of reshaping an organization. This is so because this means that the organizational change leaders would only have to focus on decoding one culture. This can be an easier and more efficient approach than convincing the departments, teams, and individual members of the organization to adhere to the proposed changes. The organization’s culture can be used as a guide by change management leaders to implement the planned changes faster.
As a concrete example, suppose that the existing organizational culture of a hypothetical company that is undergoing extensive changes suggests that the employees’ preferred style of implementation is based on a democracy. The change management leaders can use this as an input that would make it easier for them to determine what future steps to take.
Given this information, the change management leaders can organize a voting system about the wanted and unwanted parts of the proposed organizational changes. The employees would most likely see that they have a representation in the company’s decision making processes. This can be a big deal for the employees because their perceptions about the proposed changes would be affected positively.
In the end, managing changes involve cracking the organization’s culture and knowing its weak spots. A logical move would then be to take advantage of the culture’s weak spots in order to make the transition easier and more efficient not only for the change management leaders but also for the employees .
Critical Perspective to the Theory of Leadership and Culture within the Context of Change
Combining the ideas that were uncovered and discussed in relation to the theories of leadership and organizational culture, two inferences can be safety presented. Firstly, about the theory of leadership, a leader’s skills and competencies would almost always have a considerable impact on the positivity or negativity of the outcomes of a change management project. Naturally, a more skilled and competent leader would be ideal.
A leader also has to be receptive and at the same time adaptive to the changes himself because the employees and other non-employee members of the organization are most likely going to look up to the leader as a reference. This means that continuous evaluations, feedback gathering, and readjustment cycles are going to be needed in order for a truly serious leader to come up with the most appropriately tweaked approach on how a proposed set of changes is going to be implemented.
Secondly, an organization’s culture can definitely have an impact on the entire process of change management’s outcomes. An organization’s culture is basically a framework of ideas, beliefs, behaviors, and values that contributes to the process of setting the uniqueness of an organization’s identity. The purpose of organizational culture is akin to that of a key.
A change management leader who is serious about successfully implementing the changes in a proposed change management program would have to have a thorough understanding of the target organization’s culture first before he can truly come up with the most appropriately tweaked set of methods and strategies. This was explained in deeper detail in the section about how organizational culture can impact change management within an organization. What makes the theories about organizational culture related to the theories of leadership is the fact that a skilled and competent leader should be able to decipher the puzzle that is the target organization’s culture.
A change management leader who has truly understood his organization’s culture would know the things that he can and cannot due throughout the entire course of the organizational reshaping process. He would also know what to expect from the employees initially and in the latter part of the change management process. This type of knowledge can prove to be golden because it enables the change management leaders to have an ample amount of time to react and devise more appropriate and presumably better working strategies and methods. In the end, leadership and organizational culture can both be considered as important keys to effective organizational change management.
Bibliography
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