BLOG 4- Leadership and change

Change in an organization refers to the process of revamping the direction, structure and capabilities to match the changing demands of the companies external and internal customers (By 2005). Ebongkeng (2018) added that change leads the managerial staff to be proactive towards environmental change or challenges.  Organization change allows companies to remain competitive and statistical data showed that one third of organization change by leaders were perceived successful (Pieterse, Caniels and Homan 2012). According to Husain (2013), communication between staff and leaders are required as they cannot assume that everyone will accept change and communication towards change must be initiated systematically.

 

Resistance towards Change

Resistance is deemed to happen in an organization when less employee participation is involved in the decision making process and lack of trust in the contribution of the management (Boohene and Williams 2012). The two sources on resisting organizational change are individual sources and organizational source (Masunda 2015). The author mentioned that individual sources were due to accustomed ways and the need for security is high as it threatens their feelings and safety. Besides this, resistance by organizational sources were due to limited focus of change which were rejected by large groups (Masunda 2015).

 

Statement by Mullins (2013)

I would disagree towards the sentence by Mullins ‘there is little management can do about resistance to change’. There are ways for management to handle resistance towards change and the key factor is communication within the organization.

 

Lewin Model Theory

This Lewin model was founded by Kurt Lewin in 1947 which was considered the pioneer in change management comprising of three steps of change which is unfreeze, change, refreeze (Cummings, Bridgeman and Brown 2016). The first step which is unfreezing refers to the process of discarding old methods and ready to adapt new behaviors (Sarayreh, Khudair and Barakat 2013). Step two refers to the change in processes whereas step three is refreezing which states the stability of the group after a new behavior has been adopted. Lock (2018) stated that if any of these steps were missed; the process of change will encounter resistance as the old values will resurface to counter the change.

Figure 1-Kurt Lewin’s Change Model

 

Limitation of the model

According to Cummings, Bridgeman and Brown (2016), the inelastic idea of the stage ‘refreeze’ is not appropriate in our current competitive world which will require flexibility and adaption. Moreover, this model is too simple in today’s organization as it does not cater to rapid change (Lock 2018).

 

Kotter’s 8-Step Process

Apart from Lewin’s theory, managers can add on by using Kotter’s 8 step model to implement change powerfully and successfully in an organization. According to Kotter (2006), there are 8 steps which companies can adapt but a sense of urgency has to be developed prior to proceeding with the remaining steps.

 

Figure 2- Kotter’s 8 Step Process

 

Examples of successful change (Microsoft)

 

Figure 3-Current CEO Satya Nadella and Ex-CEO Steve Ballmer

 

Microsoft had restructured their organizational chart which was then steered by the Ex-CEO Steve Ballmer towards the end of his career in order to curb the downturn of customers and keep up with competitors like Apple and Google (Molina and Acohido 2013). The authors added that upon the reshuffling, its share rose by 2.8%. New CEO Satya Nadella restructured the organization in 2018 to bring in more Artificial Intelligence (AI) into the Microsoft range. Microsoft took a new direction in splitting into three major divisions which are Experiences and Devices, Cloud and AI platform and existing Microsoft research branch (Gershgorn 2018). The resulting change boosted the company’s stock market to USD 712 Billion which was a whopping 143% in 2014 and maintained an annual growth of revenue which significantly grew due to its leadership style (Cohan 2018). Although there were layoffs in the process, it was largely in the sales division which contributes to less than 10% of the company’s total sales force from a total of 200,000 employees globally (Haselton 2017). The author added that this change is not about cost cutting but a reflection of Microsoft’s sales handling in order to grow.

 

Conclusion

Leaders in organizations should be considerate towards the acceptance or the resistance of change which is introduced to overcome challenges faced by the company. By applying the right theory and framework, leaders can manage the organization, guide and communicate in order for a successful change. As quoted by Mark Zuckerberg, “In a world that’s changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risk” (Phillips 2014).

 

 (752 Words).

 

Reference

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Cohan, P. (2018) ‘Successful Leadership Turbocharged Microsoft’s Value by $ 430 Billion’. Inc [online] 11^th April. Available from                                                                                                                           <https://www.inc.com/kevin-j-ryan/adidas-future-lab-video.html> [13^th March 2019].

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