EFFECT OF ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE AND DEVELOPMENT ON EMPLOYEE PERFORMANCE
Need help with a related project topic or New topic? Send Us Your Topic
DOWNLOAD THE COMPLETE PROJECT MATERIAL
EFFECT OF ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE AND DEVELOPMENT ON EMPLOYEE PERFORMANCE
Chapter One:
Introduction
1.1 Background of the Study
Today’s business environment causes workplace change to occur more quickly and frequently than ever before. Mergers and acquisitions, new technologies, restructuring, downsizing, and the economic catastrophe are all contributing to an increasingly unstable environment.
The ability to adapt to changing work environments is critical for both individual and organisational survival. Change will be constant, and learning to manage and lead it requires not only a grasp of human dynamics, but also the ability to manage and lead change effectively (Pettigrew and Whipp, 1991).
Change is unavoidable. It is the one consistent aspect of the human phenomenon. Organisational transformation occurs when a corporation moves from its existing state to a desired future state.
Managing organisational change is the process of planning and implementing change in organisations in such a way that employee opposition and cost to the organisation are minimised while the change effort’s effectiveness is maximised.
Change is both necessary and desirable for any dynamic organisation (Fajana, 2002). To remain competitive in today’s business world, businesses must undergo practically constant transformation. Globalisation of markets and quickly growing technologies push businesses to adapt in order to thrive.
Such modifications can range from trivial, such as installing a new software programme, to big, such as refocusing an entire marketing approach. According to Thomas S. Bateman and Carl P. Zeithaml’s book Management: Function and Strategy, organisations must evolve as their environments change.
Today, businesses are inundated with extraordinarily rapid rates of change from a dizzyingly vast number of sources. Inside pressures originate from senior management and lower-level employees who advocate for change. Outside pressures are caused by changes in the legal, competitive, technological, and economic settings.
Acceptance of organisational change refers to employees’ readiness, willingness, support, and commitment to organisational values throughout periods of significant internal and external structural transformations. Managers must not rush to implement a change.
The approach must be slow, consistent, and thorough (Fajana, 2002). Acceptance of change indicates the affected parties’ desire to embrace and function in a newly formed order, as well as their commitment to effecting and implementing such changes.
According to scholars such as Pettigrew and Whipp (1991), Fajana (2002), and Armstrong (2004), for planned change to produce the desired results, it must be introduced, implemented
and managed in such a way that it attracts and gains the commitment of the affected parties to drive the changes in order to achieve the desired goals, as well as the existence of a common vision that change for the organisation is necessary and inevitable.
Conceptually, the change process begins with the recognition of the need for change. An examination of this circumstance and the factors that have caused it results in a diagnostic of their distinguishing traits and an advice of what action should be taken.
Change indicates the impacted parties’ readiness to embrace and function in a newly formed order, as well as their commitment to effect and implement the changes (Armstrong, 2004).
Making changes can also be painful. When planning a shift, individuals have a propensity to believe that it will be a rational and linear process of progressing from point A to point B; nevertheless, this is not the case.
According to Pettigrew and Whipp (1991), change implementation is an interactive, cumulative process that involves reformulation in usage. To manage change, one must first understand the many types of change and why people oppose it.
It is critical to remember that individuals seeking change must be consistent in their goals while remaining adaptable in their methods. Bateman and Zeithaml (1990) highlighted four key areas for organisational change:
strategy, technology, structure, and people. All four areas are interconnected, and while attempting to modify one, businesses frequently need to make adjustments in the others as well.
The first element is strategy adjustments, which can occur on a broad scale–for example, when a corporation adjusts its resources to join a new line of business–or on a small one, such as when a company improves productivity to cut costs.
A corporation making a strategic shift goes through three fundamental stages: recognising that the current strategy is no longer appropriate for the company’s position, developing a vision for the company’s future path, and implementing the change and establishing new processes to support it.
Technological changes are frequently introduced as components of wider strategy changes, although they can also occur independently. Identifying who in the organisation will be threatened by the change is a crucial part of changing technology.
To be successful, a technology change must be integrated into the company’s overall systems, as well as a management structure that can support it. Structural changes can also be caused by strategic changes, such as when a company decides to purchase another business and must integrate it, as well as operational or managerial style changes.
For example, a corporation that wants to introduce more participatory decision making may need to restructure its hierarchical structure. People changes might be necessitated by other changes, or corporations may simply aim to modify employees’ attitudes and behaviours in order to boost their performance.
Attempting a strategic change, introducing new technology, or making other changes in the workplace can all have an impact on people’s attitudes (sometimes negatively) (Bateman and Zeithaml, 1990).
However, management frequently begins programmes with the explicit objective of directly and favourably influencing the people themselves. In any event, personnel changes can be the most challenging and critical component of the total change process.
The discipline of organisational development was developed to cope with transforming individuals on the job using approaches including education and training, team building, and career planning.
According to extant theoretical and empirical research, negative appraisal and resistance to change can occur for a variety of reasons. Bateman and Zeithaml (1990) identified a number of frequent reasons why people resist change.
These include inertia, or people’s tendency to become comfortable with the status quo; timing, as when change efforts are introduced at a time when workers are busy or have a bad relationship with management;
surprise, because people’s reflex is to resist when confronted with a sudden, radical change; and peer pressure, which may cause a group to resist due to anti-management feelings even if individual members do not oppose the change.
Resistance might also stem from people’s beliefs about how the change will effect them personally. They may oppose because they are afraid of losing their employment or prestige, because they may not comprehend the goal of the change, or simply because they see the change differently from management.
Making a strong case for change is crucial for it to have long-term impact. The source of knowledge regarding the change must be reliable. Stroh’s (2001-2002) study found that employee participation leads to more positive relationships with the organisation and thus higher willingness to change; consequently, the research aims to provide an assessment of organisational change and its impact on employee performance.
1.2 Statement of the Problem
The business climate causes change in the workplace more abruptly and frequently than ever before. Mergers and acquisitions, new technologies, restructuring, downsizing, and the economic catastrophe are all contributing to an increasingly unstable environment. Individual and organisational survival depend on an organization’s ability to adapt to changing working conditions.
Change will be constant, and learning to manage and lead it requires not only a grasp of human dynamics, but also the ability to manage and lead change effectively (Pettigrew and Whipp, 1991).
However, for change to have the desired effect, it must be accepted and embraced by the organization’s personnel, which is not always the case. Most changes result in employee resistance to change inside the organisation, resulting in low morale and productivity.
As a result, the problem confronting this research is to provide an evaluation of organisational change and development and their impact on employee performance using a case study of Union Bank Plc.
Need help with a related project topic or New topic? Send Us Your Topic