Challenges Facing Organizational Change Management: A Literature Review

Literature Review

Discuss about the Literature on Sustaining Organizational Change.

In the modern society, organizations are recording more changes than ever before. One of the known major causes of rapid change is globalization that leads to increased market diversification and increased urge to become more competitive to cope with the rest and increase profit margins. Organizational change management refers to a field that guides on preparation, equipping and supporting individuals to successfully adapt change to be able to drive organizational success and outcomes (Ullrich, 2016). While in most cases changes and individuals are unique, research shows that the affected people cope up with the transition can be influenced by some actions. Organizational change management provides a framework of how individuals can be supported in their organization to make them successfully transit from their current status the future state (Cook, 2015). Better still, organizational change management is a structural approach purposed for coping with new business processes changes in an organizational structure or enterprise cultural changes. Even though there are various structured processes towards change management, there are several challenges in successful change management. This paper is aimed at exploring the challenges that face organizational change management field. The paper will have a literature review in the challenges facing the field after which a critique of the same will follow.

Some authors have explored the subject, may be because it is a vital subject that lays guidelines on how organizations can recover after a particular change and cope with it to become more productive. According to different authors, the field is faced with some challenges. While various authors analyze the challenges in different perspectives, their arguments have some common distinguishing factors. According to (Cameron, 2015), organizations either change or remain the same. The author says that one of the challenges in the field is resistance to change. This school of thought argues that people are status quo biased to the extent of being willing to get low pay to get into an organization that is stable. He adds that resistance to change is accompanied by political motives and that most of the times people resist changes originating from political adversaries. He argues that people may directly resist a change through either political influence or indirectly through passive aggressive behavior.

Another challenge is an unknown current state. He claims that an architect will find it difficult to repair a building without first looking at the existing blueprints. He argues that most of the organizations often try to change without looking at their blueprints leading to complexity of the architecture of the building. Making a blind change makes it difficult to transition to a future state (Kezar, 2016). Another challenge is integration. The author compares managing a large organization to repairing an aircraft which is still on the flight. He argues that change is a moving target and hence process implementation will change the business processes it supports. Moreover, changing the structure of an organization will result in employee turnover occurring in parallel. The author concludes that long-running changes which have many integration points are usually prone to failure.

Resistance to Change

According to this author, competitive forces is another challenge. Many times, organizational change is brought about by external forces like competition, technological change, market conditions, external threats and economic forces. Organizational change may be a response to external threats. In case a competitor releases a product that is many years beyond of your product, you may be driven to an extreme pace of change where you are most likely to fail (Gioia, 2017).  According to the same author, another challenge in the organizational change management discipline is complexity. Sometimes organizations develop more complex systems, processes hence product change become very difficult to make, and therefore complexity of a change is a big setback. He holds that complex changes demand an effective and efficient project, quality, knowledge, risk and change management. He concludes with a change management principle that one should never tackle a change too complex for his organization to manage.

According to another author, one of the challenges that face organizational change management is planning. The author holds that without a stepwise planning an organizational change leads to increased problems than the benefits it is expected to bring. He argues that one should know which changes are to be made and how they are planned to occur. Overall, the author advises that it is important to have prior planning of how the change will be executed. Another challenge is lack of consensus (Buchanan, 2015). The author argues that not involving everyone in the corporate changes results to increased barriers to the change implementation. He says that a decision to make corporate changes should come from the top organizational level. He also argues that the concerned management level staff should be there and prepared to deal with the challenges otherwise the staff will decline to embrace it.

Another challenge according to the same author is communication failure. He argues that failing to inform all employees in the organization before the change is implemented leads to fear and rumors in the whole organization mostly it is major change like downsizing or emergence (Betancourt, 2015). Communication failure brings about the uncertainty that makes the employees feel as not being part of the decision. He, therefore, advises involvement of employees and updating them about the plans and progress in the change implementation. Another challenge is employee resistance. The author claims that at times employees resist change mostly when they were comfortable with the way their organization runs, the reason being they have been used to their expectations in the organization. He says that there are some major changes which disrupt the familiarity of the employee’s something that makes them upset. In cases like that, employees do not want to relearn their jobs or change their routine of undertaking their duties (Grosser, 2016). That becomes an enormous challenge. His conclusion advocates for the provision of training services regarding any new responsibilities and supporting the employees to ease the transition.

Unknown Current State

Now, according to another school of thought, one of the challenges is not involving the employees. He claims that that is the major and most common barrier to effective change management. He says that many employees fear change and that it is likely that even the employees would who are most loyal resist the change if they were not involved. He adds that failing to involve employees in the change implementation process leads to fear of the unknown resulting in lack of desire to support the change which now becomes very challenging. According to the same author, another challenge is lack of effective communication strategy. He says that in most of the organization’s top leaders announce a change and assume that the employees will automatically adjust to the new change, something that is untrue. The author further argues that this method is the silliest way to bring a change and therefore it leads to change resistance. He says that employees usually ha e the right and urge to know how the proposed change will affect them and how they will be able to adapt it.

According to this school of thought, another challenge is bad culture shift planning. The author says that sometimes the planning team does not have the idea that the change will affect the people. He claims that the team mostly concentrates on planning the administrative structure, job responsibilities as well as work reporting structure while giving a blind eye to decisions concerning feelings and intuitions (Meyer, 2016). As a result, therefore, that becomes a challenge to change management. Another challenge is an unknown current state. He claims that many organizations try to introduce and to execute a change without a good assessment and understanding of their current blueprint. He advises that this can be overcome by developing a full understanding of the current blueprint of the corporation before formulating or implementing any change.

Organizational complexity is yet another challenge. The author argues that there comes a time when organizations begin to develop complex processes making the process of planning and implementing a change seem difficult (Avey, 2015) and (Buck, 2015). He says that these complexities are complex products, processes, and systems which are change barriers because organization members find it difficult to understand them. He suggests that an organization can counter this barrier through the use of a quality, diligent and effective change management approach. He says that it is advisable not to tackle a change too complex for an organization. He also argues that it is not wise to implement complex changes if an organization is not mature enough to handle the complex change.

Integration

The literature review above concerning the challenges that face organizational change management discipline, it is clear that different schools of thoughts have different approaches, thoughts, and ideas towards the subject. However, when examined keenly, their arguments have the same basis (Kuipers, 2016). In the consideration the first author, his arguments are very true, and he has gathered enough evidence to support them.  As noted from the above literature review, the author’s challenges are the ones that are facing organizations in the modern day business world. That shows that the author conducted enough research to know what the contemporary organizations are undergoing. His explanations provided are valid, convincing and elaborate.

As an example, the author mentions resistance to change as one of the challenges facing organizational change management. He starts by stating that people are status quo biased and goes ahead to prove the same by telling us that they are more willing get a lower pay to get into a stable organization than getting a higher pay in an unstable changing organization (Kerzner, 2017). He goes ahead to provide the reason as to why people tend to resist change. He precisely illustrates how they resist the change. That is a clear implication of enough pre-conducted research concerning the study topic.

The second author has studied the topic from a different perspective. He has examined the challenges of organizational change management field from the employee’s point of view instead of that of the organization. He has looked at the factors that discourage employees from being ready to cope with changes in poor planning, poor communication and lack of consensus. The arguments are true and have enough explanations to warrant credit. The author has invested his time to explain his arguments for them to be easily understood satisfactorily. The challenges discussed by the author apply to organizations in the modern day business world and thus his article proves to be helpful (Lewis, 2016) and (Kiefer, 2015).

While the first author’s points are strong enough to hold water, he is too brief. The author decided to tackle key points rather than giving full explanations. That is one of the drawbacks of his work. Regarding the principle he gave concerning the complexity barrier that organizations should not tackle complex changes; it’s more of an opinion than reality. This principle, however convincing, discourages organizations as it drives that view that some challenges in change management are beyond solution which is not true (Dyer, 2015). In the business world, every problem has a solution, and thus the author should have wisely given a solution to the problem rather than arguing for not attempting at all.

Competitive Forces

However his arguments are true and practical, the author ought not to have looked at the challenges in the employees’ perspective only. Instead, the author should also have looked at the challenges in the organization perspective analyzing factors such as competitive forces, an unknown current state among others (Bolman, 2017). That approach would have been more helpful than the one used. The third author shows no evidence of research concerning the subject. His arguments are a mere copy and paste of the first author’s arguments. Evident from the literature review, the author has given similar challenges as those given by the first author. The author is not original and has evidently distorted the first author’s message attempting to attain uniqueness. As a result, his work cannot be used as the basis for research, academic study or discussion. His arguments are weak and baseless because they have not introduced anything new on the subject. According to the literature tge main problems towards change management is resistance to change, not knowing the current tste, lack of a good plan and poor communication.

Conclusion

It is difficult to manage change because most of the people are status quo biased. This fact makes business organizations threatened whenever they think of introducing a change in their organization, regardless of what change it is. Organizations have even failed to stand competition from their rivals due to inability to make changes in their structure, systems as well as operations because of the unsupportive workforce. Most of the people will more easily embrace a change. However, this should not be used as an excuse for nit dropping outdated practices. A fact that should be appreciated is that the change management challenges can be managed by good strategic planning as well as prior communication and involvement of the affected member. As a result, organizations should make positive changes without fear.

References

Avey, J., 2015. Can positive employees help positive organizational change? Impact of psychological capital and emotions on relevant attitudes and behaviors. The journal of applied behavioral science, 4(9), pp.52-67.

Betancourt, J., 2015. Organizational change management for health equity. Perspectives from the Disparities Leadership Programs, 6(4), pp.79-94.

Bolman, L., 2017. Reframing organizations. Artistry, choice, and leadership, 4(76), pp.56-78.

Buchanan, D., 2015. No going back: A review of the literature on sustaining organizational change. International Journal of Management Reviews, 45(9), pp.60-70.

Buck, T., 2015. Long-term orientation and international joint venture strategies in modern China. International Business Review, 5(8), pp.65-89.

Cameron, E., 2015. Making sense of change management. A complete guide to the models, tools, and techniques of organizational change, 65(9), pp.68-83.

Cook, S., 2015. Change management excellence. Using the four bits of intelligence for a successful organizational change, 6(34), pp.60-84.

Dyer, L., 2015. Studying human resource strategy: An approach and an agenda. Industrial Relations. A Journal of Economy and Society, 7(4), pp.98-106.

Gioia, D., 2017. Identity, image, and issue interpretation: Sensemaking during a strategic change in academia. Administrative science quarterly, 5(8), pp.45-81.

Grosser, T., 2016. Employee Perceptions of Network Change Following an Organizational Change. In Academy of Management Proceedings, 9(5), pp.54-78.

Kerzner, H., 2017. A systems approach to planning, scheduling, and controlling. Project management, 3(6), pp.56-75.

Kezar, A., 2016. Understanding and Facilitating Organizational Change in the 21st Century: Recent Research and Conceptualizations. ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report, 6(9), pp.45-62.

Kiefer, T., 2015. Feeling bad: Antecedents and consequences of negative emotions in ongoing change. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 4(67), pp.58-76.

Kuipers, B., 2016. The management of change in public organizations. A literature review. Public administration, 56(89), pp.45-49.

Lewis, S., 2016. Appreciative inquiry for change management. Using AI to facilitate organizational development, 5(8), pp.45-69.

Meyer, J., 2016. Employee commitment and support for an organizational change: Test of the three?component model in two cultures. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 5(8), pp.56-89.

Ullrich, J., 2016. Continuity and change in mergers and acquisitions: A social identity case study of a German industrial merger. Journal of Management Studies, 5(8), pp.73-79.