MANAGEMENT OF CHANGE
2.6 A CHANGING ORGANIZATIONAL FUTURE
This section addresses issues of how organizational dynamics, social demographics, changing occupational structures, work force diversity, lifestyles, gender dimensions and education are likely to influence and change the nature of organizational life, directly or indirectly, in the future of organizational change. The need for mangers to continuously keep track of internal and external environmental forces that may advocate for change in organizations is highlighted.
2.6.1 General Trends
According to Senior (2002: 342), the general trends highlighted are likely to affect industry, lifestyles and social structures which, in turn, will affect organizations, their structures, strategies, how they are led, employment practices and the need to work with change.
• Individuality: a decline in traditional family norms.
• Choice: an increase in choice of home, work and leisure.
• Mobility: an Increase in the mobility of individuals regarding residence, working, and personal relationships.
• Identity: increased 'fluidity' in personal identities because of increased mobility and more transient working arrangements, personal relations and leisure.
• Independence: increased freedom from traditional obligations leads to more self- centredness, self-indulgence and hedonistic psychologies.
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Anxiety and risk: a more rootless society giving rise to feelings of insecurity; society perceived as perhaps high-risk and threatening or exciting and challenging.• Creativity: increased focus on self-interest and individuality will encourage personal creativity generating a more innovative society.
• Globalisation: increase in international division of labour with greater global segregation between developed and under-developed economies.
• Information and communications technologies (ICTs): increasing capabilities of lCTs leading to the decline in traditional forms of organizations.
• Bio-technologies: genetic engineering; increased ability to control patterns of reproduction, and technologies to improve health.
• Socio-economic inequalities: increased polarization in cultural, educational and material living standards.
(Senior, 2002: 342)
It is advised that management, to be able to stabilize and reinforce change processes, should
take cognizance of these trends so as to be able to predict future organizational changes and deal with the uncertainty presented by these trends as forces for change.
2.6.2 Changing Organizational Practices
Robbins and DeCenzo (1998 and 2001), have suggested a number of practices that organizations should take cognizance of and if need the need arises change the practices in order to improve effectiveness, efficiency and to gain sustainable competitive advantage.
These practices are discussed as follows:
More and more employees are concerned about the quality of work life. This includes adequate and fair compensation, safe and healthy working conditions, opportunities for continued growth and security, opportunities for human capacity development, social integration in the work-place, balanced working roles, as well as socially beneficial and responsible work. The challenge is therefore to meet employee needs by continuously conducting human resources audits to assess whether available skills are being used
effectively, whether available jobs are sufficiently challenging and whether there are new avenues for development. It is also in the interest of the organization to realize the optimal return from its employees while making the organization an attractive place to work. There is a drastic need to balance work and leisure in terms of adequate compensation for overtime worked and to provide a non-discriminatory platform for voicing grievances.
In implementing any change process in the organization, it is imperative that management should understand the workforce diversity characterized by heterogeneous workers in terms of race, gender, age and ethnicity. Since employees do not set aside cultural values and lifestyle preferences when they go to work, the challenge for managers is, therefore, to make organizations more accommodating of diverse groups of employees and to address employee problems according to individual needs. There is a need to acknowledge that employees are the key to the success of any organization and should be treated as valuable assets.
The complexity and nature of many jobs, is changing, as workers tend to be considerably more knowledgeable about how best to do their jobs, in some cases more so than those who manage them. Management should recognize that they could improve efficiency, quality, and productivity and employee commitment by re-designing jobs in order to increase the decision-making discretion of workers and to meet changing work processes. This can be achieved through continuous empowerment of workers and by encouraging their participation in decision-making. Work teams could be used to increases employee effectiveness, responsibility and control.
The need for flexibility of hours of work, poses a threat to the productivity of organizations as this had resulted in an increased use of a contingent work force. This is due to the fact that most people now prefer to take up part-time jobs that do not conform to a full-time working week of forty hours, five days a week. Employees prefer to work flexible hours that fit in with their family and other commitments. For some people, part-time work represents more income as more jobs are can be held simultaneously. However, for the organization, this is critical as it creates pressure for meeting performance targets and it also implies increased labour costs.
Due to ever-changing environmental conditions, firms are experiencing increased pressure to become more productive and deal with very short product and service life cycles. Employees are obliged to work harder, longer and faster. As a result companies are taking much of home
life. The rapid organizational changes may bring stress to employees. Unless organizations develop support mechanisms to keep stress manageable, both the organization and employees are likely to pay a heavy price. To deal with this phenomenon, organizations should do something to create a conducive working environment that will keep employees motivated.
As more and more jobs become specialized, organizations are faced with issues pertaining to the outsourcing routine and peripheral jobs. The problem with outsourcing is that some employees may get retrenched due to the downsizing of operations and organizations may lose some irreplaceable human resource assets.
There is also the challenge of meeting stakeholder needs. The organization's effectiveness and competitiveness is determined by satisfying the needs of stakeholders through high performance standards. This can be done through the use of the Balanced Scorecard by measuring organizational performance and presenting it to stakeholders. The Balanced Scorecard is important as it highlights the most important aspects of the business that need focus to enhance competitiveness. These include being customer-focused, improving quality, emphasizing on teamwork and managing for the long-term.
Meeting stakeholder needs also involves total quality management (TQM) , which can be considered as "getting it right the first time" in order to reduce control costs. TQM requires the matching of skills with work requirements to continuously improve quality and productivity using work teams and training programmes.
The high performance work systems emphasize on the maximization of strategic fit between a company's social and technical system. This however presents organizations with the dilemma of getting working workers with job specific knowledge and basic skills to keep pace with product or services developments and design improvements. The need for improved interpersonal skills and relations cannot be over-emphasized.
Organizations should also be socially responsive. They must not only fulfil not only their obligations of performing long term-goals that are good for society, but they should be able to adapt to ever changing societal conditions.
Successful managers are encouraged to make sense of tough situations when everything seems futile. They should be able to turn disasters into opportunities, be flexible in their management styles, work smarter, and be quick with informed decision-making, efficient in managing scarce resources, better at understanding and satisfying employees and customers and lastly, confident in enacting massive and revolutionary changes.
(Robbins and DeCenzo, 1998 and 2001)