Organizational change – typology of evolutionary and strategic changes

Introduction:

This assignment examines organizational change, focusing on the distinction of changes according to their scope and presenting a typology of evolutionary and strategic changes. Business in the new millennium will continue to increase in intricacy. More and more, this demanding environment forces executives and managers to deal with constant change. Globalisation, increased opposition, international development and reformation are just a few of the challenges faced daily. Success in dealing with these new challenges will depend to a great extent on the organisation’s ability to change and adapt. It will depend on how well these organisations can manage these situations by understanding the opportunities and challenges that accompany it. The organisations that will succeed are those that recognise and react the fastest to change. Therefore, the ability of an organisation’s staff to change can mean the difference between scraping just to get by or else becoming the industry leader. In either case the results translates into millions of dollars in revenues, profits, or losses. It must therefore be accepted that change is an organisational reality. It is critical therefore for managers and executives in today’s business environment to be equipped with the skills necessary to manage change. Ultimately it is people who make organisations, and if they do not change, then there is no organisational change. The challenge therefore is for managers and executives to not only know what to change but how to go about it especially in relation to people, products, processes and systems, marketing strategies etc. Just like the butterfly, organisations will have to change and undergo a metamorphosis before they can ‘fly’. If they do not, they will be doomed to live out their lives only as ‘caterpillars’, or worse still become dinosaurs.

Litrature Review:

Organizational change is an empirical observation in an organizational entity of variations in shape, quality or state over time (Van de Ven and Poole, 1995), after the deliberate introduction of new ways of thinking, acting and operating (Schalk, Campbell and Freese, 1998). The general aim of organizational change is an adaptation to the environment (Barr, Stimpert and Huff, 1992; Child and Smith, 1987; Leana and Barry, 2000) or an improvement in performance (Boeker, 1997; Keck and Tushman, 1993). This definition encompasses many situations that should be distinguished by applying certain dimensions to establish ‘typologies of change’. We will refer to the scope of change, because it is one of the most used variables in literature to design change typologies. That way, changes can be defined along a continuum starting in lowscope or evolutionary changes to high-scope or strategic ones. With the aim of making the use of this dimension (scope) easier, we will describe both extremes of the continuum, but we should always keep in mind that real changes are not a pure type but a mixture. First, we will describe evolutionary, incremental, or first order changes. These are small changes that alter certain small aspects, looking for an improvement in the present situation, but keeping the general working framework (Blumenthal and Haspeslagh, 1994; Goodstein and Burke, 1991; Greiner, 1972; Levy, 1986; Mezias and Glynn, 1993; Nadler and Tushman, 1989; 1990). The second type of changes arestrategic, transformational, revolutionary or second order ones. They are radical transformations, where the organization totally changes its essential framework (Blumenthal and Haspeslagh, 1994; Ghoshal and Bartlett, 1996; Goodstein and Burke, 1991; Marshak, 1993; Nadler and Tushman, 1989, 1990), looking generally for a new competitive advantage (Hutt, Walker and Frankwick, 1995) and affecting the basic capabilities of the organization (Ruiz and Lorenzo, 1999).

Background to Change exits in HP Economic Movement: Managing change is one of the most important issues confronting information technology (IT) organizations today. By combining three powerful products—HP Service centre software, HP Change Control Management software and HP Universal Configuration Management Database (CMDB) software—HP Change Management Suite software gives IT managers, changer managers and change advisory boards (CABs) a complete solution for managing change within an IT environment. This tightly integrated solution enables IT departments to gain visibility into the IT environment and service dependencies, and manage the change process in a standardized manner to increase the number of effective, well-founded changes their companies undertake. It also provides decision support for the CAB by auto mating impact analysis to make change decisions based upon business impact and mitigates the risks inherent in instituting change.

Strengths and Weaknesses of Change within an organisation in regards to HP:

Strengths:

Sole point of contact, high market consciousness, easier for customers to deal and cooperate.

Easier to preserve functional skill, staffs tends to be more loyal to occupation, frequently has lower cost at the unit level.

Highly combined work units, integrated functions, and backup skills.

Easier harmonization, determined on the customer, more supple, minimal isolation, flatter, staff gain broader information of the business.

Federal responsibility, higher quality, faster decision making, focused on the customer of each product/service group.

Flexible resource planning, high practical knowledge exposed to diversity, forced collaboration service areas.

Weaknesses:

Less contribution/higher costs, more product or service changeability.

Tends not to have end-to-end customer sight, practical priorities sometime are contradictory, more difficult to transform processes due to isolation of functions.

Some laying-off of functions, lower sense of useful responsibility.

Difficult to put into practice and maintain, requires cross functional expertise, long term management commitment.

Comparison of alternative forms of organisational development:

Digital change and organisational Development:

It is been investigated the determinants of local governmental presence and the influence of organizational presence using econometric scrutiny, supported by qualitative information from the review. The variables included in these regressions and the hypotheses about the impacts of explanatory variables are discussed in a later section. In all regressions, the coefficients and standard errors were corrected for sampling weights, stratification, and the total number of communities in the central region (StataCorp 1997). The results are thus agent of the province as a whole. Standard mistakes were approximate using the Huber-White estimator, and are thus robust to general forms of heteroskedasticity (White 1980). A pathways of enlargement found in the region, were included as descriptive factors in the analysis (along with other factors).10 A development pathway is defined as a common prototype of change in livelihoods and resource management, and thus represents a particular set of economic opportunities and constraints (Pender, Scherr, and Duron 1999). Using data on occupations and changes in profession and land use since the mid-1970s, six pathways of development were acknowledged. Basic grain (maize, beans and sorghum) production is the most or second most important profession in all but one of the sample communities. Other factors were therefore more determinate in characteristic the pathways. The pathways include villages where 1) basic grain production is the dominant economic activity and has been expanding during the past 20 years (“basic grains expansion pathway”), 2) basic grains production is the dominant economic activity though production has been sluggish or failing (“basic grains stagnation pathway”), 3) horticultural (mainly vegetable) production has amplified and has become the first or second most important activity (“horticultural expansion pathway”), 4) coffee production has increased and is the first or second most important activity (“coffee expansion pathway”), 5) forestry performance are the first or second most important activity (“forestry specialization pathway”), and 6) non-farm employment has increased and become the first or second most important source of income (“non-farm employment pathway”).

Involvement of Stakeholders in the Introduction of Change in an Organisation:

Stakeholders, including NGOs, investors, and activists, as well as communities, labour, and consumers, are playing an increasingly important role in improving corporate behaviour. Some NGOs are using tactics of direct confrontation. Others have been working for years to create partnerships with companies in order to help them green their production, often in ways that actually save them money. As well, the investor community is taking an increasingly active role in encouraging corporations to consider not just the next quarter’s earnings but also the long-term financial risks of failing to address broader social and environmental issues. Together, these are proving key strategies in compelling corporations to internalize the environmental and social costs that are often ignored in the mad race for profit.

Analysis and Evaluation of the Strategies:

Corporate managers face many daily pressures, and improving social and environmental records (often in ways that don’t directly enhance the bottom line) is not generally their highest priority—until their corporations suddenly become the targets of bad publicity from a coordinated group of activists. With corporations spending a half trillion dollars each year to create positive images through advertising, a sudden storm of negative publicity from the actions of thousands of coordinated activists can swiftly raise environmental issues to the top of managers’ action-item lists. This fear of public shaming—and the connected loss of profit and stock value—are what makes these “corporate campaigns” so successful. Unlike traditional campaigns against companies, such as boycotts, labour strikes, and litigation (which remain important but often have limited objectives), corporate campaigns treat the targeted company more as a lever of change than as an end in itself. When a coalition of NGOs and investors led by the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) targeted Citigroup, the goal was to reduce overall exploitation of natural resources. But RAN didn’t target mining and logging companies—which are not in the public eye and depend on continued extraction to survive—pouncing instead on the financial institutions that capitalize the mining and logging companies. Unlike them, banks spend billions to maintain strong brands and customer bases. These assets are essential, and thus exploitable vulnerabilities.And exploit RAN did. In 2000, RAN asked Citigroup to adopt a green lending policy.While the company initially refused, after more than three years of protests, shareholder actions, and other irritating tactics, Citigroup finally recognized that lending to unsustainable industries would be more costly than profitable, while not lending to them would be worth its weight in free advertising. Once Citigroup yielded, its antagonistic relationship with RAN evolved into a collaboration to ensure adherence to its new standards—a partnership that provided much free publicity to Citigroup. Meanwhile, RAN quietly drafted a letter to Bank of America asking managers to adopt a similar policy. Bank of America, having witnessed the disruption that committed activists can cause by chaining themselves to bank doors, quickly realized that it was better to join the ranks of ecofriendly banks. Bank of America’s capitulation then left JPMorgan Chase as the next target, and it soon followed suit.

Conclusion:

It can be argued that the booming management of change is vital to any organisation in order to endure and succeed in the present highly economical and endlessly evolving business environment. However, theories and approaches to change management currently available to academics and practitioners are often clashing, mostly deficient pragmatic evidence and supported by undisguised hypotheses concerning the nature of fashionable organisational change management. The reason of this assignment was, therefore, to provide a significant review of some of the main concepts and methodologies to organisational change management as an important initial step towards implementing a new framework for managing change.

Reference:

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Blumenthal, B. and Haspeslagh, P. (1994) “Toward a Definition of Corporate Transformation”, Sloan Management Review, 35 (3), pp. 101-106.

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