ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE

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Introduction:

The businesses today operate and function amongst several associated characteristics of change like transience, novelty, uncertainty, diversity and interdependence; and all of these forces tend to evolve and alter over a period of time.

Organizational change therefore is always a major challenge in terms of the requirements of sustaining the momentum of change, the efforts involved in the initiation of a new project, the nature of strategic objectives and goals and also resource conservation (Jones, 2010).

It is often contended that organizational change is a basically a simple process but is rendered complicated owing to the varying nature of the implementation approaches (Buchanan & Badham, 2008).

This essay is aimed at examining the validity of this statement through an analysis of the nature of organizational change and its implementation.

Organizational changes occur in a variety of ways and can be both straightforward and complicated and can easily be affected by unexpected and unforeseen circumstances (Vakola & Nikolaou, 2005). Organizational change is in reality a simple process that has been made more complicated by the implementation of different approaches by the corporate world.

This is primarily because of the reason that change in essence is very intricate, as it involves interaction between the individuals and also the use of interpersonal and institutional elements in nonobvious and unforeseen ways (Bercovitz & Feldman, 2008). British Airways learnt this the hard way when the company suffered several losses while implementing change (Balmer, Stuart & Greyser, 2009).

For many years, academics, business managers and consultants have realized the fact that the transformation of any organization is a difficult process, but they do agree on the influence of the correct approach being used towards the success of any strategic program.

It has also been observed that different companies use different approaches with regards to bringing change in different parts and processes of their organization (Oreg, 2006).

For instance, Jaguar Land Rover resorted to technological transformation for the revival of the company (Gomes Et al., 2007), while British Airways involved its employees within the change process (Balmer, Stuart & Greyser, 2009).

The contemporary businesses are operating in a world where new initiatives, emphasis upon technological perfection, project based functioning and staying ahead of the competition, drive the change, which is why there are so many approaches towards implementing organizational changes. These approaches mostly include traditional, pragmatic pathway, incremental and structural approaches (Caldwell, 2006).

One of the most common change paradigms is the traditional approach which includes the pursuit of incremental modifications comprising of cost cutting changes and marginal product improvement.

It also involves big bang change approaches which are characterized by the high profile plans having multimillion dollar investments, large teams being employed for the implementation and complicated multiyear operation programs.

The traditional changes therefore include large scale technological developments and multifaceted business management innovations, but can only be made possible by using a …