Barriers to Implementing Organizational Change Management

Discuss About The Organizational Issues Implementation Adoption.

In the current business scenario, one of the major challenges that are being faced by the business organizations is the change in the market state of affairs. This is due to the fact that current market trend is rapidly changing with the change in the customer requirement and expectations. One of the most effective strategies being initiated by the business organizations in overcoming the issue of rapid market change is implementing change management. This refers to the concept of changing the certain existing approach of the business organization in accordance to the current market needs. Thus, effective implementation of the change management will ensure that the policies and strategies of the organization are at par to the market requirements.

However, on the other hand, there are some barriers also being faced by the business organizations in implementing the change in place. This is due to the reason that there are number of stakeholders involved in the change process and requirements of them are different and varied. Two of the major barriers that emerge in the implementation of change management are ineffectiveness in adopting technology and vested interest of different stakeholders.

This essay will discuss about these barriers in the change management process along with discussing the potential steps that can help in overcoming these barriers. In addition, real examples will be used in relation to the change management barriers.

Technology is one of the major barriers that can get emerge in the implementation process of the change management. Major cases of the change management in the organizations are initiated in order to have latest technologies in place to get the access to the latest technologies to stay competitive in the market. However, the issue get originate when the associated stakeholders are not get accustomed with the desired technology. According to Michel, Todnem and Burnes (2013), there is huge probability of emergence of resistance from the side of the employees. This is due to the reason that employees are always skeptical about the benefits of the potential change in the organization. Thus, they always tend to resists to the change. The authors have also stated that technology is one of the major and most common areas where employees tend to resist to the change. This is due to the fact that adoption of the new and latest technology in the organization will always related to the reduction in the need of the man power in the organization. Thus, adopting new technology in the organization are negatively perceived by the employees in major cases.

Technology

Another issue or barrier that can get emerge from the initiation of the change management in technological field is the lack of the motivation of the associated stakeholders in accepting and adopting the new technologies over their existing ones. According to Ahmad, Tarek Amer, Qutaifan and AIhilali (2013), employees also resist in adopting newer technologies in their workplace. This is due to the reason that they are having lack of motivation to adopt new ideas. They are much accustomed and comfortable with their existing systems and process and do not have the motivation or interest to get change to different organizational process. According to the authors, one of the major reasons of lack of motivation for the employees in adopting newer technology is requirement of preparing themselves from scratch to get accustomed with the newer technologies.

Another major reason for the technological barrier in the organizational change management is the lack of organizational capability in adopting the new technologies. According to Cresswell and Sheikh (2013), implementing the technology in the organization will also require the expertise from the perspective of the upper level management along with having the access to favorable infrastructure and capital for investments. The authors have stated that implementation of newer and latest technologies requires favorable organizational infrastructure. However, for the small and medium business organizations, having huge investment for developing the infrastructure is not possible and difficult. Thus, though they have the need of initiation of new technologies in place but not having access to the capital and favorable infrastructure is costing them.

For instance, Nokia is one of prime examples of not getting adopted with the changing technologies and failed in the market. Nokia was once the market leader in the mobile device market. However, in the later time, their customer base and sales revenue got reduced they cannot able to have extensive investment in developing new technologies (Honghua & Juan, 2014). This led to the failure of the Nokia as a brand and currently they are nowhere in the global market. Thus, technological barrier to the change management can lead to organizational failure also.

Apart from the technological barrier, another major issue that can get emerged in the implementation of the organizational change is the different vested interests of the internal stakeholders in the organization. According to Appelbaum (2013), in the current business scenario, majority of the large business organizations is having diversified workforce in place. Employees are coming from different social and background and thus they are having different interest and approaches. The authors have also stated that diverse workforce will also have diverse set of interest, which sometimes tend to lead to conflict. Organizational change management is being initiated in order to achieve certain objectives and goals, which may not be accepted by all the employees. Initiation of the new policies may conflict with the particular interest of the some set of employees. Thus, it will lead to the emergence of the resistance from the side of the employees.

Vested interests

Another barrier that can get emerged in the initiation of the organizational change management is the difference of opinion and interest between the management and employees. As stated by Bateh, Castaneda and Farah (2013), difference between the opinion of the employees and the upper level management is the most common issue that can get emerges from the implementation of the organizational change management. In major cases, it is being seen that upper level management is having different set of interests from the employees in implementing a change process. This caused resistance from the employees and barrier in the entire change management process.

One of the famous examples of employee resistance due to difference in vested interest is the case of Uber. They faced the employee resistance in initiating new employee management approach. This is due to the reason that, Uber introduced the concept of freelancing drivers who will work for them but they will have benefits as the permanent employees (Gloss, McGregor & Brown, 2016). The major interest of the management is to reduce the cost in employee management but it clashed with the employee interest and met with resistance from the side of the employees.

According to the Lewin’s change management model, there are three basic steps that should be considered by the organizations prior to the implementation of the change. The first step in the change management process is unfreezing the existing process and policies of the organization (Shirey, 2013). In this step, it is recommended that the employees should also be involved in decision making process in the implementation process. This will help to gather the feedback and opinion from the employees regarding the areas of improvement. These gaps can be more effectively determined if employees are being involved in the process. Change management process can be implemented effectively considering the issues of the employees that will ensure that employee issues will get less generated. According to the Lewin’s change management process, it is also recommended that the organizational capability should also be measured prior to the initiation of the change. This will ensure that development of the infrastructure will be favorable for the change process and also the change will be implemented according to the available organizational resources (Cummings, Bridgman & Brown, 2016).

The next step of the Lewin;s change management model is implementing the change. In this step, it is recommended that the change should be implemented in phase manner. This will ensure that any shortcomings can be detected in the primary stage and in a particular area. In accordance to that, the change plan can be improved and re-implemented. This will also ensure that issues related to the employees will get reduced and can be avoided.

Strategies to Overcome Barriers

The last step in the Lewin’s change management process is refreezing. It is recommend that in this step; the mangers should evaluate the effectiveness of the implemented plan by gathering feedback from the employees (Hornstein, 2015). It will also help in identifying the areas of improvement in the implemented plan and modify it accordingly. This will determine the gaps in the process and what should be done in order to overcome the gaps. This will also identify the technological gaps that may emerge in the process.

Conclusion

Thus, it can be concluded that technology and vested interest of the stakeholders are the two barriers that can get emerges in the initiation of the change management from different perspectives. This essay discussed about the different perspectives of barriers in the change management along with stating some real world examples. Moreover, it is also concluded that Lewin’s change management model will be the most effective in overcoming these barriers.

Reference

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Cresswell, K., & Sheikh, A. (2013). Organizational issues in the implementation and adoption of health information technology innovations: an interpretative review. International journal of medical informatics, 82(5), e73-e86.

Cummings, S., Bridgman, T., & Brown, K. G. (2016). Unfreezing change as three steps: Rethinking Kurt Lewin’s legacy for change management. human relations, 69(1), 33-60.

Glöss, M., McGregor, M., & Brown, B. (2016, May). Designing for labour: Uber and the on-demand mobile workforce. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1632-1643). ACM.

Honghua, Q., & Juan, C. (2014). An Analysis on the Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) between Microsoft and Nokia from the Perspective of Patent Information: a Comparative Study. Journal of Intelligence, 2, 012.

Hornstein, H. A. (2015). The integration of project management and organizational change management is now a necessity. International Journal of Project Management, 33(2), 291-298.

Michel, A., Todnem By, R., & Burnes, B. (2013). The limitations of dispositional resistance in relation to organizational change. Management Decision, 51(4), 761-780.

Shirey, M. R. (2013). Lewin’s theory of planned change as a strategic resource. Journal of Nursing Administration, 43(2), 69-72.