Organization Change and Development?

             Organization Change and Development

» Nature of Organizational Change
» Causes of Organization Change
» Human Reactions to Change
» Resistance to Change
» Need of Organizational Development
» Benefits of Organizational Development
» Limitation of Organizational Development
» Themes of Organizational Development

Nature of Organizational Change

The term change refers to an alteration in a system whether physical, biological, or social thus organizational change is the alteration of work environment in the organization. Organizational change may have following features :

• 1. When change occurs in any part of organization it disturb the old equilibrium of organization.
• 2. Any change in organization can effect either whole organization or some part of organization directly or indirectly.
• 3. Organizational change is a continuous process.

Causes of Organization Change

• 1. Government policies - sometimes the government policies change due to which an organization has to bring change. For e.g. when computerization came into existence government banks make their employee change from manual process to computerized so organization has to go for a change.
• 2. Competition - in order to sustain in a market any organization has to be competitive in nature as there is cut throat competition if one company is going for innovation other has to also go for it. For example in case of Coke and Pepsi if one goes for new advertisement another will also go for same and bring change in their advertisement policies.
• 3. Technology - today is the world of new innovation day by day new technologies are emerging for example now a days computers have become obsolete and laptops and LCD’s have emerged.so change is must.
• 4. Change in customer requirement - customer is a king.so these days companies produce product as per customer demand. Accordingly every time a company makes changes in the product so change is must.
• 5. Change in managerial personnel - employees come and leave organization every time a new manager will bring his own new ideas and make employees according to that and this is how change occurs in organization.
• 6. Deficiency in existing organization - sometimes the managers in the organization think that there is deficiency in the existing organization system and in order to compete and to survive there must be change in the organization. For example change in system from centralization to decentralization.

Human Reactions to Change

When change is initiated both manager and employees react to it. Though human reaction to change depends on the outcomes of the change particularly its impact on their need satisfaction, often the attitudes of people play as a significant role in deciding human response to change.

• 1. Resistance-people resist a change when they have a feeling that the change is unfavorable for them. Resistance to change becomes more forceful when the people have feeling that through resistance they may eliminate the change.
• 2. Indifference-sometimes people don’t react to change either positively or negatively. The reason may be that either they fail to interpret the outcome of the change on their need satisfaction, or they feel that it has nothing to do with them.
• 3. Acceptance-if they perceive that the change is favorable for them they will accept the change. They can do it in two ways. First they may accept change and adopt it. Second they may anticipate change and plan for it.

Resistance to Change

Resistance to change is very common phenomenon. Not only employees but organizational members such as top management people will also resist change.

Individual factors for resistance to change:

• 1. Problem of adjustment - perhaps most important factor for resistance to change is the problem of adjustment. Each individual tries to maintain a sort of equilibrium both at formal level as well as at informal level.
• 2. Economic reason - people resist to change if they feel that it is likely to affect them unfavorably so far as their economic needs are concerned.
• 3. Emotional factor - there are many emotional factors which resist change, especially if the past experience with the change level not been positive.
• 4. Fear of unknown - change is future oriented. Therefore some amount of uncertainty is always there. People will not ready to accept change because of two reasons. First, people may derive benefits or otherwise in future while they have to pay the cost at the present. Second, future is uncertain and the impact may be different from the expectations.
• 5. Ego defensiveness - sometimes people resist change because it is ego deflating. Everyone has some ego it is the state of a person’s way of behaving, thinking, and feeling any attack on ego will be resisted.
• 6. Social displacements - whenever change take place it often results in social displacement of people like breaking of informal groups and relationship.as a result there is a possibilities for the employees to experience psychological let down therefore they dislike change.

Need of Organizational Development

Organizational development is a dynamic technique.it uses the behavioral science knowledge to cope up with the change. Every organization wants to compete and to survive in the long run so organizational development plays a vital role to fulfill the need of survival of organization.

• 1. Training for change - change is compulsory in the organization to survive in the long run so organizational development creates an easy environment in the organization to bring changes that it supports training.
• 2. Responsive organizational culture - organizational development helps in making the organizational culture more responsive.it works in the all the direction of organization.

Benefits of organizational development

• 1. It gives more emphasis on human resources rather than any other physical resources.
• 2. It helps in development of human resources by initiating change.
• 3. It provides opportunities and challenge for the human beings to use their abilities.
• 4. It helps to achieve organizational effectiveness.

Limitation of Organizational Development

• 1. Organizational development based on behavioral science approach which itself has to many limitations.
• 2. Organizational development is applicable on the basis of circumstances available in organization.so if the circumstances are not proper, it can put limitation on effectiveness of organizational development.

Themes of Organizational Development

• 1. Planned change - change means the new state of things and is different from old state of things. Change is everywhere due to internal as well as external factors. External factors may include competition; customer and technology internal factor may include new market opportunities, increasing diverse work force new direction etc.
• 2. Consultant’s role/distinctive consulting method - leader in organization hire an organizational development practitioner to solve the problem. The expert establishes relationship with the members of the organization. The practitioner does not provide any solution to the problem but he provides the learning to the members that how they should solve the problem by themselves.
• 3. Action research model - it is described as a process that involves series of events and action.

Key aspects of action research model

1. Diagnoses.
2. Data gathering.
3. Feedback of the client group.
4. Data discussion.
5. Work by the client group.
6. Action plug.
7. Action.

Action research-action research attempts to meet the goals of the organization more effectively. In fact these are the programs and intervention designed to solve the problems and improve the condition.

Action research is a process of systematically collecting research data about an ongoing system relative to some objectives, goals or need of that system, feeding this data back into the system and taking action to solve the problem, then evaluating the results of action by collecting more data.