Change Management
Fabrication International
CHANGE Management AT FI
(i) Critical Assessment of Investment-Appraisal Process
The investment appraisal process at Fabrication International (FI) is divided into four distinct steps. This appraisal process reflects the values and concerns of top management that it seeks to realize during the decision making process. FI is marked by traditional expectations of doing business. It expects its long time customers to continue doing business with it irrespective of economic realities. This mindset has prevented the company from modernizing itself. Recently, the company decided to introduce a computerized welding system to bring in latest technology to its manufacturing processes. The investment decision also went through the same appraisal process that was used for the smaller scale projects the company had been dealing in up until the present.
In the first step of the investment appraisal process, the departmental heads are asked to draw up a wish list of all the investments they would like to make for their department during the year. They are not expected to provide any more financial scope other than a ball park figure. What they are asked to do is to provide a justification for the project in line with the strategic goals and objectives of the company.
This first step of the investment appraisal process seems fairly innocuous because it allows the departmental heads the freedom to think about innovation and technology upgradation at the company. The departmental heads may use their own intuition and the feedback of their subordinates to identify key areas for investment in the coming year. The appraisal process also seems to encourage free thinking because it encourages departmental heads to come up with investment projects without feeling bogged down with too much financial analysis. The responsibility to provide at least a ball park figure helps to keep the departmental heads within the bounds of reality and prevents them from getting carried away by the excitement. A third advantage of this stage is that it encourages departmental heads to develop a strategic perspective of activities within their control and their role in the organization. Making a strategic justification mandatory at the very beginning of the investment appraisal process makes certain that all departmental heads are thinking along strategic lines and about projects that can help the organization attain its strategic objectives. It also enables departmental heads to consider the existing strengths and weaknesses of the company before bringing up a list of investment proposals for the top management to consider.
In terms of choice management-change management, the requirements of this stage encourage departmental heads to exercise the choice process stage identified by Burnes (1998). They get the opportunity to analyze the context, history and past of the company before deciding on the trajectory or the means of getting to the future (Simms, 2005). In other words, the choice management-change management model assumes that managers are not condemned to their planned strategy or to the environmental forces, but have the opportunity to exercise choice (Eckermann, Lin & Nagalingam, 2003). According to Burnes (1998), the choice and trajectory stages act independently of one another as well as in continuation of each other, hence it is stated here that the exercise of the choice process helps to set the stage for the trajectory process as a subsequent step in the change management process. The first step also encourages managers to exercise managerial choice. The freedom afforded to them at this stage is sufficient opportunity for them to think of ways in which they might want to align the organization to the environment as well as influencing environmental factors to suit organizational interests.
Along with these advantages, the first step also leaves room open for some negative aspects. The relative freedom and wide field given to the departmental heads by the top management leaves open some room for this freedom to be misused. Since departmental heads know that their ideas will not be accepted immediately but will be subjected to further screening and evaluation, they may be tempted to exercise a lack of judgment in evaluating which projects should be included in the wish list. As a result, a lot of irrelevant projects may also be included in the list along with the relevant ones. In addition to including irrelevant and unnecessary projects, departmental heads may also unethically inflate the expected funding required for the project since only an estimate of the investment amount is required at this stage. Finally, the departmental heads may be motivated by inter-departmental rivalries and may compete with one another by including exorbitant projects that may have little more than prestige value for the organization. The overall effect of all these disadvantages is that the board of directors are encumbered with appraising too many projects, which may negatively affect the quality of their decision making.
The second stage of the appraisal process brings together each departmental head with a member of the board of directors. The appraisal process makes certain that the board director is a dispassionate member with regard to the interests of the departmental head. The two go through a rigorous process of discussion on each item on the wish list to screen all the items. Ultimately, by the end of this stage, the wish list has been whittled down to just five items from the original list prepared by the departmental head.
This stage also has a few advantages. Firstly, the involvement of a dispassionate board member serves two important functions. It conveys the interest of the senior management in the plans of the middle managers. This enables better communication and sharing of ideas between the two important management layers. The second aspect of this is that it brings in neutrality to the discussion so that although the board member is in a position of authority, he or she is also well-distanced from the scope of authority and interest of the departmental head that he is able to take an objective and impartial view of the matter. Therefore, this helps to avoid a conflict of interest between the departmental head and the director because they do not get the opportunity to collude or seek mutual favors from one another.
This stage allows the departmental heads to develop their sense of long-term vision through engaging in discussions with a senior strategic level manager (Simms, 2005). They are able to develop both a sense of vision and a sense of strategy to guide their change management initiatives. Whereas the first stage encourages an exploration of ideas, the second stage encourages managers to develop a realistic vision of the future and determine the strategic value of their investment proposals.
During the third stage of the appraisal process, the projects that have been narrowed down are formulated in terms of a complete financial case specifying the scope of the project, scale of investment, source and use of funds along with other measures such as net present value and payback period. The effects on the competitiveness of the organization are also discussed. This stage encourages the development of change objectives and planning as the departmental heads construct their investment proposals in practicable and quantitative terms. Managers get to identify loopholes in their proposals and identify remedial measures. This helps them to exercise managerial choice and the realignment of their plans with environmental realities.
In the fourth stage, the board of directors meets for two days where they discuss each of the shortlisted projects and evaluate their suitability against certain criteria. The projects need to fall within the maximum investment budget the board has determined for the year. Secondly, the board of directors will only accept projects that can assure a payback return period of two to three years. Projects where the company will be able to recover its investment over a period extending beyond three years are rejected. Finally, one project from each department has to be approved.
While this stage offers all the advantages and disadvantages associated with open discussion at the top management level, certain structural flaws in the criteria for assessment are so fundamental that their negative effects outweigh most of the advantages the appraisal process can promise. For instance, the reduction of the wish list to five items for each department seems redundant when the board has already set a budget for the investment projects for the year. This means that after all the projects have been selected, there may still be funds available for investment in other projects, which is a source of inefficiency. Secondly, the appraisal process centers exclusively on the project cost. Although a strategic orientation is emphasized in the first stage of the appraisal process, the discussion with the departmental head and among the board members is based on the cost savings aspect alone, as evidenced in the case of the CWS project. Thirdly, the board’s fixation with a two to three-year payback period reflects short-termism whereas given the company’s current competitive position; the opposite approach should be adopted. To implement innovation and to stay competitive over the long-term, the company should be willing to accept projects with an investment payback period extending two to three years. Such a fixation would prevent capital investment projects that the firm desperately needs to develop its capacity to meet the demands for cost, quality and reliability from its customers. According to Reid & Smith (2008), long-term investors accept a maximum payback period of six years while short-term investors demand a payback period of around one to two and a half years. It is apparent from the board’s handling of the CWS project that it failed to deliver on all these counts to its customers, making it even more uncompetitive due to its flawed appraisal process.
Q. 1. (ii) Major Mistakes with the CWS Adoption
The faulty appraisal process and unrealistic assumptions of the board of directors were primarily responsible for the faulty adoption of the computerized welding system. The assigned section describes the responsibilities, duties and challenges of a correctional officer. These mistakes reflected the rigid short-term mentality of the board of directors who were probably more concerned about delivering quick financial returns to the owners instead of developing competitive advantage over the long-term.
One of the major mistakes committed by the board of directors was the decision to forgo with the turnkey contractor and to assign the responsibility of assembling, installing and getting the entire system to run to the company’s engineering team. This was an unrealistic project for the engineering team who were clearly incapable of handling such a large scale project. The FI Company had not been using a lot of capital intensive work processes which failed to develop the level of skill and competency among its engineering team necessary for handling such a large project. This failure reflects the inability of the senior management to take appropriate manager choices. According to the choice management-change management principles, managers should make a realistic assessment of their firm’s history, context, strengths and weaknesses before developing a strategy for change. In this case, the board of directors was completely at a loss to assess the ability of their engineering staff to handle responsibility for assembling possibly the largest capital investment in the history of the company. They should have known that the contractor would be the right person to deliver the project on time and according to the specifications of the company. But the directors were only interested in short-term cost cutting which jeopardized the future of the company as well as the careers of the employees. This has been recognized by Tidd & Bissant (2009) as a weakness of the Anglo-Saxon view on innovation.
Related to the above-mentioned strategic error was the short-term cost-centered approach of the board of directors. This was what led the managers to accept the CWS project after reducing its budget by £200 and expecting that cost to be covered by doing away with the turnkey contractor and depending on the engineering team of the company to install the CWS and get it up and running. The board of directors grossly underestimated the benefits of incurring slightly higher initial costs to secure efficiencies over the long-term. They were probably interested in meeting their fixed annual investment budget as opposed to improving the competitiveness of the company in a meaningful way. As a result, they jeopardized the financial success of the project itself.
As a result of their short-term focus on initial costs, the project went over budget and beyond the deadline because the company’s engineering team could not secure the supplies and parts at the costs guaranteed by the turnkey contractor. They were also unable to get the supplies within the delivery dates that would have been possible had the turnkey contractor been retained. This was because the turnkey contractor enjoyed good business relationships with the suppliers and could secure special price and delivery terms because of high volume purchases. The board of directors failed to anticipate this.
Due to their lack of vision and strategy, the budget for the CWS project had to be increased considerably and the deadline had to be extended as well. In the end, the project incurred a total cost of £1,250,000 for the company as opposed to an initially projected £1,025,000. In addition, the project took two years to complete whereas it would have taken only nine months for the turnkey contractor to get the project operational. Hence, the lack of visionary and strategic thinking caused a major loss to the already vulnerable company.
The low level of interest and ownership in the CWS project shown by the senior management and the project team members was also a major reason for the failure of the project. Along with emphasizing initial cost over long-term value, lack of support, ownership and leadership is a common reason for the failure of many projects (Chartered Institute of Building, 2010). From the onset, the board of directors was divided about the project with the Marketing Director and Design Director in favor of it and the Finance Director in opposition. When stakeholders are opposed to a project, it weakens the foundation for the successful outcome (Andersen, Grude, & Haug, 2009). Once the project had been approved, neither member of the board of directors took any active interest in the execution of the project. Given that the original project requirements had been modified by the board of directors, they should have taken a deeper interest in the progress of the project. The only senior management representative who took an interest in the project was the Finance Director who played more of a negative role than offering constructive guidance. His obsession with the cost of the project created problems for the project manager who also had to face the low motivation levels from his team members.
Apart from the apathy of senior management, the departmental head also maintained aloofness with the project, even though it had significant effects on the productivity of his department and he was the one who had requested its approval. The departmental head did not provide any positive feedback to the project manager, which was another reason why the entire team did not have any faith in the project. The situation was one involving high uncertainty but possessed all the symptoms of poor problem recognition identified by Buelens & Devos (2008, p. 89) — “groupthink, passing the buck and procrastination.” The poor level of enthusiasm and motivation among the team members was also a reason for the failure of the project to be launched on time and within budget. The team members probably had realized the unrealistic expectations and were unmoved by the commitment of the project manager to see the project through. They had little coordination with the project manager which also led to the failure of the CWS project.
In addition to the narrow vision and apathy of the senior management, another reason for the failure of the project, and the likelihood of similar failures in future, was the reactionary response of the senior management to the obstacles in the project. The response of senior management to the project manager’s request for more funds and time was negative and the only reason the request was granted was to avoid having to abort the project. Even after the project was made operational, the board of directors went on a witch hunt as a result of which the Managing Director terminated the project manager who was the only person to have remained committed to the project despite the lack of interest and hostility shown by everybody else. In addition, even after the project was made operational, the board of directors adopted an even more conservative approach to investment appraisal with the likelihood of fewer projects with strategic benefits to be accepted. The result would be a decline in business competitiveness.
Poor communication was also a reason for the poor outcome of the CWS project. The various stakeholders continued to hold their turf interests paramount and nobody demonstrated a concern for the strategic interests of the company. For the board of directors, the strategic interests were interpreted in terms of financial returns and payback period. Clearly, the investment appraisal process that required requests for investment funding to come from departmental heads had caused the heads to view each other as rivals competing for the same scarce resources. As a result, there was a lack of cooperation for what was considered the other department’s project instead of the project of the company. The project manager also failed to apprise the board of directors regularly about the problems faced during the execution of the project, which is one reason why the directors cannot be blamed completely for their extreme reaction to the manager’s request for additional funding.
All of the problems discussed above could have been avoided if the directors had adopted a strategic approach to the appraisal process. Considerations other than cost should have been included in the appraisal criteria in the light of the competitive challenges. They should have been willing to take greater risk for greater benefits over the long-term. They viewed the success of the company in financial terms only whereas the need of the hour was to increase the technical competence of the company’s manufacturing processes for which significant investments would have been necessary. Therefore, the directors should have developed a more realistic picture of their present and future states so that they could have created a better strategy for the company.
The outcome of the project could also have been improved by encouraging a sense of collective organization-wide ownership of the project. The project was made the sole responsibility of the senior manager and he was the one to lose his job in the end. The directors and the departmental head should have adopted a more constructive role instead of a passive and critical one. The directors and the departmental head should also have taken part in monitoring and implementing the project, providing necessary feedback and solutions to the project manager at each stage. This would likely have also improved the morale and commitment of the project team members who had a crucial role to play in the success of the project.
Q. 1. (iii) Preferred Response to the Budget Cut Decision
As stated in the previous question, some responsibility for the poor outcome of the CWS project lies with the project manager. If I were the senior engineer in charge of the CWS project, I would not commit mistakes made by the senior engineer after the decision to cut the budget was made by the board of directors.
Communication between the project manager and senior manager is essential for the successful outcome of the project. It is also important that communication be undertaken after understanding the perspective and values of the other party. In the present case, the board of directors represented a conservative mindset and was extremely risk-averse. Their criteria for investment appraisal were also severely restrictive making it almost impossible for a long-term capital investment to be made. The board of directors probably was not attuned to the changes taking place in the competitive environment and did not realize its urgency. Hence, as the senior engineer, I would have tried my best to communicate these concerns to the senior management instead of accepting them passively and dooming the project to failure.
I would have communicated the concerns to the board of directors while emphasizing the financial losses that would accrue to the company if the original budget was not adhered to. An important concern for the board of directors might have been that they might not have possessed sufficient understanding of the technical skill and competency required to undertake the CWS project. This is one reason why they might have erred in placing the entire responsibility for implementing the project on a team that had neither experience nor resources in managing a project of such a large scale. According to Rogers & Duffy (2012), a rational approach to project planning requires decision makers to rely on the input from technical experts. Therefore, I would also have explained the savings in terms of time and cost that would have benefited the company if the turnkey contractor would have been retained.
If, despite my attempts at communicating my concerns to the board of directors, I would have been unable to get them to reverse the budget cut, I would have simply declined to accept responsibility for a project that would set me and my team up for failure. This might have had negative repercussions for my job. However, the failure of the project also resulted in a similar fate for the senior engineer. Weighing both the outcomes, it would have created a less negative impression on my career if I had taken a stand on an issue based on my professional belief. In that case, the outcome of the project would have vindicated my position and confirmed my belief to the board of directors.
Assuming that I had to assume responsibility as project manager for the CWS installation, I would have tried to get my team on board and secure their ongoing commitment to the project. In the given case, the project team members did not share the conviction of the senior engineer because he probably had not bothered to secure their dedication and commitment to the project. The project team had been created by gathering experts from various departments such as engineers, maintenance officer and shop floor staff. These individuals possessed diverse backgrounds and technical competencies. Therefore, it was necessary to create a common sense of understanding about the project and a sense of unity and mission within the team. I would have tried to secure this commitment because this would have encouraged team members to take greater interest in the project and to take initiative in thinking of solutions to overcoming the roadblocks. For instance, they could have identified possible suppliers who could have supplied parts at lower rates or within shorter delivery times. Stensaker & Langley (2010) also recognize that managers have to navigate a path between corporate expectations, employee concerns and their own beliefs of what is required in a change management situation.
In addition to communicating with the senior management and my team members, I would also have tried to bring the departmental head on board and involve him in the planning and execution of the project. The departmental head had also adopted a distance from the project after its budget had been slashed by the board of directors for the reason that the project was no longer viable. By securing the cooperation of the departmental head, I would have probably been in a stronger position to present my case before the board of directors and persuade them to reverse their decision.
The departmental head would also be in a better position to advise me on the business case for the project, which would have made greater sense to the board of directors compared to the technical reasons I had to give for sticking to the original budget. The biggest impact would eventually have been on the departmental head because the productivity of his own department would have suffered most because of the failure of the project. In future, the investment proposals presented by the departmental head would likely be scrutinized with greater intensity because of a bad experience with the CWS project. His own professional integrity and political power in the company would have suffered if he was made responsible for bringing up the project.
I would have communicated these concerns to the departmental head to sensitize him to the need for taking ownership of the project and to concern him with its outcome. This would have helped him to provide better input to the situation and cooperation on convincing the board of directors to reappraise the project. Such an approach would have helped to build inter-departmental cooperation in the organization with brighter prospects of collaborative investment projects emerging in the future.
In the position of the senior engineer, I would have made a greater attempt at implementing choice management-change management principles during my handling of the CWS project. One mistake that the senior engineer committed was waiting until the very last minute to seek help from the board of directors. This naturally put him in a poor light and ultimately cost him his job. He probably did not know about choice management-change management principles. These principles prescribe a model for change management that illustrates a via media between models of planned strategy and emergent strategy (Collins, 2005).
Whereas planned strategy models prescribe that strategies once formulated require utter devotion and commitment towards realization of intended results, emergent strategy models prescribe strategy making within an environment in a perpetual state of flux, requiring managers to constantly adapt their strategies to the environmental factors. Burnes’ model of choice management-change management offers a middle path by stating that managers can exercise choice by developing a change management strategy based on insights from the past and the desired future state, but are free to make changes based on environmental changes.
In this way, strategies can be forged and reforged as the needs dictate. Another difference of the choice management-change management models is that managers are believed to have the capacity to change the organizational strategy or the environmental factors depending on the situation. In this way, managers are able to exercise greater choice. A belief in the choice management-change management model can create a sense of empowerment among managers which would have helped the senior engineer to assert himself even amidst all the apathy and hostility surrounding his project.
I would have followed the choice management-change management model in determining my course of action with regard to the project. Instead of remaining committed to a doomed project, I would have been motivated to make a greater effort to change the environment surrounding the project. I would have been inspired to encourage my team members to take ownership of the project instead of accepting their lack of enthusiasm as a given. Similarly, I would have made a greater effort at building bridges of communication with the departmental head and securing better sources of supplies and parts available from the market.
Although the senior engineer had initially anticipated that the project could be executed, the moment that he became aware of the difficulties in adhering to the expected budget and time restrictions, he should have spoken up about it and tried to engage the board of directors in such a strategic matter. One reason given in the case for his not doing so is that the senior engineer himself did not know whom to turn to when faced with such difficulties. This was probably due to the culture of the company where the board of directors who sanctioned the projects distanced themselves from it while it was being executed. Naturally, on being informed at the last minute of cost issues, they would have been more averse to accept any responsibility for it. A belief in the choice management-change management model would enable me as a senior manager to seek out channels of communication with the board of directors on my own and apprise them of the urgency of the situation.
In this way, through effective communication and a commitment to the choice management-change management model, I would have been able to handle the CWS project in a more efficient and responsible manner.
Q. 2 Importance of Kurt Lewin’s Contribution to Change Management
Kurt Lewin is one of the foremost scholars of social change and his ideas have found great relevance in organizational change management practices through the decades. He developed several ideas related to change management that have formed the foundation for more recent understandings of organizational change management processes and techniques. Burnes (2004) describes some of the major ideas of Lewin’s to place them in a relevant context for modern organizations. Kurt Lewin’s foremost ideas included Field Theory, Action Research, Group dynamics and the famous three-stage process of change management. According to the field theory, a system was maintained in a certain stable state by the balancing effect of opposing sets of driving and restraining forces. In contemporary organizational contexts, these driving forces may be understood as those competitive environmental factors that move an organization to change its strategy or tactics. Restraining forces may be understood as the power of organizational culture and inertia that hold an organization into current moulds of practice.
Kurt Lewin’s second important concept was that of group dynamics. In essence, the group dynamics theory asserted that behavior of individuals within a system was not determined by their individual dispositions and motives as much as it was determined by the influence of the norms, values and attitudes of particular groups that individuals belonged to. Any change in the behaviour had to be aimed at the group level and not at the individual level. Lewin’s theory of group dynamics led to the recognition of the political power of groups such as teams, quality circles, and cross-functional teams as well as cliques, coalitions, and power groups within contemporary organizations. Lewin also studied extensively and described how group norms and attitudes are established and perpetuated in the group, thus opening the doors for further study.
The concept of action research described that in order to bring about change within a system, there had to be aroused a sense of urgency for the change. Lewin termed this as a “felt need” and described it as the motivation behind the search for various alternatives and the selection of the best one to bring about the desired change. In contemporary organizations, this explains the rational model to planning and change management.
Lewin’s most notable contribution to change management was his famous 3-stage model of change management. He described the three stages as unfreezing, moving and refreezing. Unfreezing involved breaking the forces that maintained the system in the status quo. Moving was the stage when the forces in favor of the desired change were administered. Refreezing was when the system took the desired shape and assumed a new desired stable state. The concept has been likened to the way an ice cube can be unfrozen and the water then refrozen to a new shape in a different mould. This idea of change has been applied to organizational change management through the decades.
However, Burnes (2004) notes that since the 1980s, this model has become less popular with the emergence of newer models of organizational change that more explicitly recognize the role of organizational culture, a fluid environment, empowered workforce and emergent strategies. At the same time, Burnes (1998) presents a defense against criticism against Lewin’s ideas by stating that understanding all of Lewin’s ideas discussed above as an integrated whole describes all the ideas that are addressed in a more direct and explicit way by more recent theories. In this way, Lewin’s ideas remain relevant to contemporary organizations in addition to holding their importance as seminal works in change management research.
Carter (2008) presents a new model for change management in contemporary organizations. Even though it is a more recent model, it borrows extensively from the concepts presented by Lewin. Carter (2008) develops a seven stage model for change management but incorporates several ideas from Lewin’s 3-stage change process. Carter’s (2008) second stage of the model describes the importance of creating a sense of urgency in the system to motivate the individuals towards change. This can be achieved by providing some unsettling or disturbing information about the current or future state of affairs. This sense of urgency may be related to the role played by the “felt need’ in motivating individuals to seek an alternative status quo. Carter (2008) himself describes this as being similar to the unfreezing stage of Lewin’s 3-stage model of change.
Similarly, Carter (2008) also recognizes the contribution of Lewin’s force field theory in explaining organizational change. In the fifth stage of his own change management model, Carter (2008) describes how the effect of restraining forces may need to be controlled when effecting the change. The restraining forces may be active in trying to revert the organization or the system to the earlier state of affairs. These restraining forces may be represented in the form of power coalitions or groups with vested interests. In modern organizations, this may represent the struggle between various stakeholder groups as they become more empowered and assertive in the decision making process. Carter (2008) elaborates on the force field model by describing the driving and restraining forces as political, economic, legal, competitive, social and technological forces that are considered in assessing the environmental opportunities and threats of contemporary organizations. In this way, Lewin’s ideas remain relevant to contemporary studies on change management in organizations by virtue of their flexibility and scope for incorporating contemporary environmental changes.
In another related article, Burnes (2004) describes some of the recent change management theories and explains what their main criticisms against Lewin’s ideas may be based upon. Contemporary ideas of change management in organizations are based on complexity theories that recognize systems, including organizations, as more complex and dynamic than in the first half of the twentieth century. These complexity theories accuse Lewin’s ideas of being outdated and representative of a management-controlled, top-down approach to change management. Woodward & Hendry (2004) point out a similar weakness in Lewin’s ideas about change management. They state that Lewin’s ideas assume that the change management is driven by the leader and that he or she is not affected by the change program. In contrast, they propose a ‘leading and coping with change’ model that assumes that the leader is also part of the change program and is influenced by the judgmental and cognitive processes of his or her followers.
These theories also propose that change management cannot be implemented as proposed by Lewin because the environment is not stable enough to plan for a change and realize it as intended. According to these theories, change is a continuous process and Lewin’s idea that organizations move from one status quo to another through change management is not relevant to contemporary organizations. organization in contemporary times operate in fluid and dynamic environments and have t deal with a more complex set of environmental factors than organizations during the hey-days of Lewin’s 3-stage model of change management. However, Burnes (2004) effectively reveals how these theories do not contradict but support the assertions made by Lewin when all his theories are integrated into a unified framework.
Levasseur (2001, p. 71) asserts the relevance of Lewin’s ideas in contemporary times:
“Don’t let the apparent simplicity of Lewin’s model fool you. It is a truly elegant and infinitely practical guide to the host of complex and sometimes baffling issues in the change process.”
Levasseur (2001) also makes a lucid defense for Lewin’s relevance in contemporary organizations by stating that Lewin’s theories do not spell out in explicit detail how managers are expected to deal with specific change issues, but contain all the principles that are relevant to contemporary organizations. He describes two common issues in contemporary organizations and describes how Lewin’s 3-stage model of change can be applied to resolve these change management issues. He describes how unfreezing, moving and refreezing can be implemented when introducing new technology into the organization, such as when introducing computers into a workplace where employees are not technologically literate. He also discusses an example where Lewin’s 3-stage model can be used by leaders to bring about change at various levels in the organization. He cites that leaders can invite active participation from their subordinates to increase the power of driving forces and reduce the power of restraining forces.
References
Andersen, E.S., Grude, K.V., & Haug, T. 2009. Goal Directed Project Management. 4th ed. Kogan Page Limited.
Buelens, M., & Devos, G. 2008. Art and Wisdom in Choosing change Strategies: A Critical Reflection. In Boonstra, J. Dynamics of Organizational Change and Learning. 1st ed. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.
Burnes, B. (2004) Kurt Lewin and Complexity Theories: Back to the Future? Journal of Change Management, 4 (4) p.309-325.
Burnes, B. (2004) Kurt Lewin and the Planned Approach to Change: A Re-Appraisal. Journal of Management Studies, 41 (6) p.977-1002.
Carter, E. (2008) Successful Change Requires More Than Change Management. The Journal for Quality and Participation, Spring 2008 p.20-23.
Chartered Institute of Building, The. 2010. Code of Practice for Project Management for Construction and Development. 4th ed. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.
Collins, D. 2005. Organizational Change: Sociological Perspectives. 42nd ed. Routledge.
Eckermann, B., Lin, G.C.I. And Nagalingam, S. (2003) A Proactive Approach to Innovation. International Journal of Business Performance and Management, 5 (4) p.362.
Levasseur, R.E. (2001) People Skills” Change Management Tools — Lewin’s Change Model. Interfaces, 3 (4) p.71-73.
Reid, G.C., & Smith, J.A. 2008. Risk Appraisal and Venture Capital in High Technology New Ventures. 1st ed. Abingdon: Routledge.
Rogers, M., & Duffy, A. 2012. Engineering Project Appraisal. 2nd ed. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.
Simms, H. 2005. Organisational Behaviour and Change Management. Select Knowledge Limited.
Stensaker, I. And Langley, A. (2010) Change Management Choices and Trajectories in a Multidivisional Firm. British Journal of Management, 21 p.7-27.
Tidd, J., & Bessant, J. 2009. Managing Innovation: Integrating Technological, Market and Organizational Change. 4th ed. John Wiley & Sons.
Woodward, S. And Hendry, C. (2004) Leading and Coping with Change. Journal of Change Management, 4 (2) p.155-183.
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You determine when you get the paper by setting the deadline when placing the order. All papers are delivered within the deadline. We are well aware that we operate in a time-sensitive industry. As such, we have laid out strategies to ensure that the client receives the paper on time and they never miss the deadline. We understand that papers that are submitted late have some points deducted. We do not want you to miss any points due to late submission. We work on beating deadlines by huge margins in order to ensure that you have ample time to review the paper before you submit it.
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You fill all the paper instructions in the order form. Make sure you include all the helpful materials so that our academic writers can deliver the perfect paper. It will also help to eliminate unnecessary revisions.
Proceed to pay for the paper so that it can be assigned to one of our expert academic writers. The paper subject is matched with the writer’s area of specialization.
You communicate with the writer and know about the progress of the paper. The client can ask the writer for drafts of the paper. The client can upload extra material and include additional instructions from the lecturer. Receive a paper.
The paper is sent to your email and uploaded to your personal account. You also get a plagiarism report attached to your paper.
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Read moreEach paper is composed from scratch, according to your instructions. It is then checked by our plagiarism-detection software. There is no gap where plagiarism could squeeze in.
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