Change Management Approaches For Organizational Change

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Change Management Approaches in Successfully Implementing Change and Reducing Employee Resistance.

Organisational change is an ever-present feature of organisational life, both at an operational and strategic level (Burns, 2004; Todnem, 2005). According to Luecke (2003), factors such as rapid changes in technology mean the successful management of change has become a necessity in order to survive and succeed in a highly competitive and continuously evolving environment. However, despite recognising the importance of change management approaches, their success rate when adopted in organisations are low with a failure rate of around 70% (Balogun and Hope, 2004). Low success rates can suggest a lack of structure and understanding when implementing organisational change. Todnem (2005) suggests that currently, a wide range of contradictory and confusing theories and approaches are available which may be a contributor to poor success rates in change management approaches. The literature review will analyse the effectiveness of planned and emergent approaches to change management in successfully implementing change. The ability to predict and handle different responses to change among employees is a key challenge to management (Stensaker and Meyer, 2012). Understanding employee resistance to change and different factors that can contribute to the success of reducing resistance will be one of the focuses of this literature review.
From the literature, one main approach to change management is that of planned approaches. (Bamford and Forrester, 2003; Todnem, 2005). The planned approach to change is based upon the work of Kurt Lewin (1952 in Eldrod and tippet, 2002) who argues that before change and new behaviour can be adopted successful...

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...e-scale changes. The supporting literature of an emergent approach, argues against recognising change as pre-planned steps taken by management, but instead a continuous process that creates change readiness. The importance of reducing employee resistance to change is also highlighted throughout the literature. It is suggested that when implementing change, management look to communication and participation as an effective way to overcome resistance. Through doing so, employees may not only feel accepting of a proposed change but can also contribute to the quality of a change implementation. It can be recommended, that in order to increase the success of a change in an organisation, managers should be aware of the available literature in order to provide a more in-depth and focused guidance on different change approaches and models for different organisational needs.

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