Change Management in Modern Organizations, Research Paper Example

Introduction

According to several authors, (Diefenbach, 2005: 127, Wetzel and Van Gorp, 2013: 115),  today’s organizations face with an increased level of business and social environmental changes. Organizational change can be viewed as a challenge, or a stimulus for business. (Wetzel and Van Gorp, 2013: 116). The below literature review is designed to review the latest theories of organizational management regarding to change through analyzing recent publications and research studies.

Theoretical Debates

Wetzel and Van Gorp (2013: 116) states that change management theories and concepts are often criticized based on their simplicity. The author quotes several theorists who state that traditional approaches to change management are based on common sense observations and do not add value to leadership practices. Indeed, the lack of frameworks – apart from Lewin’s three-step approach – indicates that change management exists on an ideological level, but does not have applicable and useful concepts that can be implemented in organizations. While the argument of Wetzel and Van Gorp (2013) is based on thorough research, the authors of the current study would like to review further publications on change management in order to probe the validity of the statement.

The purpose of the below literature review is to examine whether there are frameworks developed based on organizational theory that support managers to deal with change. Implementing the approach used by Wetzel and Van Gorp (2013), the review of the core dimensions of the organization need to be reviewed, in order to determine whether or not the theories of change are addressing all aspects of management. The review will be completed based on the assumption that change management theories and frameworks should be based on the foundations of organizational theory (OT) and address all the aspects of leadership and management in order to become a helpful, informative and adaptable guide for leaders of organizations.

Wetzel and Van Gorp (2013: 118) state that “current OCR struggles hard with transforming the cognitive frames of topical OT into its own fruitful approaches to its object”. Therefore, the statement of will be thoroughly examined by investigating the foundations and ideas behind latest organization change research (OCR) theories. (Giraud and Autissier, 2013)

Literature Review

One of the main critical issues Wetzel and Van Gorp (2013) find related to organizational change research is that it does not take into consideration the changing environment of the business. The author claims that the foundation of the latest theories still lie in decades-old views about organizations as unchanging and stable entities. While organization theory already implemented changes related to the influence of stakeholder environment, culture and organizational approaches, vision, mission into the latest theories, according to the author, these aspects are neglected by the authors of organizational change theories and frameworks.  Interestingly, Wetzel and Van Gorp (2013) talks about the complexity of organizational environments, the authors fail to review one of the most important emergent theories that could be applied to reflect all the aspects of change; the use of complexity theory applied in OCR, mentioned by Burnes (2011).

Saka (2002: 480) agrees with Wetzel and Van Gorp (2013) that change management frameworks and theories lack a connection with original organizational theories. The author states that there are two main routes researchers use: the first one is to look at a change within the organization as a linear, rational process, and the other one looking at it as a systematic-multivariate process. The second approach, indeed, is much closer to the foundations of the latest organizational theories that look at an organization as a system, which changes on a constant basis, is influenced by internal and external changes and has a culture, vision and mission. The complexity of organizational environment certainly needs to be considered when creating new theories and frameworks to research change management.

In order to evaluate the change management approaches’ theoretical foundation and the models’ relevancy to today’s organizational environment, it is important to next review some of the most significant frameworks developed in the past decades.

By (2007: 376) has created a comparison table that analyzes the emerging models and their foundations. The author reviews three models of emergent change: Ten Commandments for Executing Change (Kanter et al, 1992), Kotter’s (1996) Eight-Stage Process for Successful Organisational Transformation and Luecke’s Seven Steps (2003).   Kotter’s (1996) Eight Stage Process for Successful Organizational Change is one of the frameworks that considers the role of vision, culture and communication as crucial in change management. The strength of the model is that it includes communication in several ways and emphasizes the role of managers to create a vision before initiating change. Kanter et al. (1992) also states that the process needs to include the step of creating a vision, but based on the first step to “Analyze the organization and its need for change” it is evident that the model looks at the organization as a separate, independent entity and the framework does not consider the role of society and stakeholders in creating a plan for change. Luecke’s Seven Steps (2003) model, on the other hand, focuses on gaining commitment and collaboration and creating a shared vision, going further than Kotter: the framework suggests that leaders should involve stakeholders in the process of identifying problems and finding a solution.

The above models of change are based on the assumption “that change should not be perceived as a series of linear events within a given period of time, but as a continuous, open-ended process of adaptation to changing circumstances and conditions” (By, 2007: 375).

Bartunek et al. (2011) also state that there are two contradicting traits of organizational change research. One group of theorists still looks at the organization the way it was examined by Lewin (1947) as a stable system, while the other group implements recent changes of theories and looks at the organizational environment’s influence when developing models. As the authors state: “the focus is switched from organizations as largely stable and punctuated occasionally by change to the ongoing actions and interactions that occur as part of everyday organizational life, altering what an organization does, maybe imperceptibly at any one point in time, from moment to moment”. The author questions whether change should be viewed as a linear process, and to what extent should the “interdependencies of existing domains of organizational activity” (Bartunek et al., 2011: 9) need to be considered when carrying out a research on organizational change.

Saka (2010: 482) concludes the main pitfall and limitation of change management theories is that most of them ignore the role of “change agents”. In his article, Saka (2010) describes change agents as those who facilitate the change. To add to this discussion, based on the above research of related theories and literature, the authors of the current study would like to also conclude that other than the lack of addressing the role of change agents, another major limitation of the theories is that they do not consider the role of the business environment; something that Wetzel and Van Gorp (2013) describes as “postmodern approach”.

Different authors call for a revision of change management concepts based on different grounds of criticism. The below categorization of identified issues based on the literature review will allow the authors to analyze emerging initiatives for developing a new change management framework strategy.

Conclusion

Wetzel and Van Gorp (2013: 132) concludes the findings of his organization change research literature review that while several authors base their concept on OT, they are selective in their choices. Further, he notes the lack of postmodern approaches of organization theory within the emerging frameworks and concepts of OCR. He finds that therefore the theories examined are not suitable for supporting managers. Based on the above literature review, the authors of the current study also find that there are several limitations of current OCR models and theories. However, apart from the lack of postmodern OT implementation, the main obstacle of creating a fully functional change management model is that none of them contain all the aspects of change: environment/stakeholders, leadership, vision, communication and culture. Indeed, the authors agree with Wetzel and Van Gorp (2013) that authors of OCR concepts are selective in implementing the latest OT approaches that look at the organization as an ever-changing entity, influenced by internal and external forces. If we accept that the organization is constantly changing and influenced by stakeholders;  the expectations of the society, regulatory environment, customers, business partners and the competition, we can look at these stakeholders as not only “influencers”, but initiators of change, therefore, collaboration is necessary between the organization and stakeholders when implementing changes, just like it is described in Luecke’s Seven Steps (2003).

In the above literature review, it has been highlighted that the most popular emerging approach to study OCR is to consider group dynamics and internal rules, processes. Culture has also been highlighted as an important feature of organizational change. While the internal rules and dynamics are highlighted as determinants of organizational change, several authors have also focused on the dynamics of external environment. Still, only three authors made it clear that multi-disciplinary methods are needed to assess the complexity of organization change. As the above literature review has proved, indeed, Wetzel and Van Gorp (2013) are right saying that authors are selective in applying OT methods for researching organizational change. Culture theory seems to be the most popular approach to analyzing change within organizations, and only a few authors have realized the need of covering multiple facets of change. Not many authors realize the impact of existing interdependencies (Bartunek et al., 2011: 9) that are present within the organization and in the business environment, therefore, this is an area that future research needs to focus on.

Reference List

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