Organizational Change Management

Organizational Change Management

Significant organizational change occurs, for example, when an organization changes its overall strategy for success, adds or removes a major section or practice, and/or wants to change the very nature by which it operates. It also occurs when an organization evolves through various life cycles, just like people must successfully evolve through life cycles. For organizations to develop, they often must undergo significant change at various points in their development. That's why the topic of organizational change and development has become widespread in communications about business, organizations, leadership and management.

Leaders and managers continually make efforts to accomplish successful and significant change -- it's inherent in their jobs. Some are very good at this effort (probably more than we realize), while others continually struggle and fail. That's often the difference between people who thrive in their roles and those that get shuttled around from job to job, ultimately settling into a role where they're frustrated and ineffective. There are many schools with educational programs about organizations, business, leadership and management. Unfortunately, there still are not enough schools with programs about how to analyze organizations, identify critically important priorities to address (such as systemic problems or exciting visions for change) and then undertake successful and significant change to address those priorities.

Change management is a basic skill in which most leaders and managers need to be competent. There are very few working working environments where change management is not important. (Anderson, 1997)

When leaders or managers are planning to manage change, there are five key principles that need to be kept in mind:

Organizational change is usually triggered by relevant environment shift, either internal or external, that sensed by companies and leads to intentionally generated response (French, Bell & Zawacki, 2006). This paper will discuss several organization development models..

Theories of Change

In order to survive and prosper in a rapid changing environment of business world, organization is often required to generate fast response to changes (French, Bell & Zawacki, 2005). Change management means to plan, initiate, realize, control, and finally stabilize change processes on both, corporate and personal level. Change may cover such diverse problems as for example strategic direction or personal development programs for staffs. In this section, several theories of change will be discussed to improve our understanding of change management in theory and practice.( Bloisi and Hunsaker, 2003)

Kurt Lewin's Three-StagesChange Model

Kurt Lewin's three stage force field theory provides guidance for organizational change which involves unfreezing, movement and refreezing. The first step in this process of change is to unfreeze the current situation, followed by a change or movement. The last step in this process is refreezing step to make the new behaviors stick (Levasseur, 2001). Disconfirmation, cognitive redefinition, and induction of survival anxiety are three processes associated with unfreezing (Schein, 1999). When dissatisfaction occurs it signals change is needed resulting in disconfirmation (Schein). The feelings, attitudes, and values associated with learning to use the new behaviors and changing the current behaviors refers to cognitive ...