Directions for 4 All responses:

Review several of your peers’ posts. Discuss any similar or opposing perspectives you have, with at least two of your peers. Take care to be professional and polite even if your beliefs or viewpoints differ. There is no word count limit.

Wk 4 Discussion 1:

Response 1 (C. Wonah)

It is common for organizations to undergo changes. Most of the times, organizational changes occur in reaction to something that is not good or right and requires to be changed (Gartenstein, 2018). Organizational changes, in most parts, are due to the rapid changes we go through in life (Weiss, 2016).

When thinking about organizational change, one example came to my mind. I used to work as a nurse at a military hospital here in Northern Virginia. One time, our leadership decided to open up our particular unit to civilians. This brought a fundamental change to the operations of the unit. All staff must now change the process of admitting patients as non-military individuals are accepted. For example, we have to find a way to screen them since they are allowed to show their driver’s license instead of a military ID. Another issue was that the military personnel on the unit were not willing to deal with civilians. Most of them left and moved to different units or left the hospital for other assignments. The change was too radical and too sudden. We did not go through any period of preparation or training.

Thinking now about this, I see that my unit leadership would have used the incremental adjustment of Dunphy and Stace as they described it in their four levels change (Weiss, 2016). They suggested that changes within an organization should happen slowly and systematically at a constant rate over time to fit the external environment. They reject the idea of radical changes which we experienced in that hospital unit.

Our leadership would have gone gradually by implementing the change piece by piece. They would have started by preparing the entire unit for the change. Applying the approach of Dunphy and Stacee, the leadership could have taken time to train the staff and set the change to go gradually with a short-term implementation first, before and long-term or a permanent change.

References

Gartenstein, D. (2018, Jul. 27). What is the meaning of organizational change? Retrieved from https://smallbusiness.chron.com/meaning-organizati…

Weiss, J.W. (2016). Organizational Change (2nd ed.) [Electronic version]. Retrieved from https://content.ashford.edu/

Response 2: (R. Izydorek)

In my personal experience with organizational change, the overall process for change could have gone a lot better. One situation comes to mind, though it might seem insignificant now that I am thinking about it. The event unfolded when my leadership had an idea to change how our how our fleet positioned the trucks in parking spots. The proposed change was to rotate the vehicles as they get used which meant to park them in different places the original spot. Employees did not understand the rationale behind the need for this change and confusion set in with wrong trucks being used for servicing and inventories miss-matching. Weiss (2016) stated that an old culture within an organization is a reason for resisting change from leaders. The old way for our fleet operations was by taking multiple trucks out for servicing and parking the vehicles back where they were before being moved. The leader could have implemented this change differently with the unfreezing, freezing, and refreezing. This technique goes through the stages of removing obstacles with the old way of doing things to make a new norm for the organization. Leadership's expectations for the change was set up with the intention to increase the fleet's life expectancy. However, proper steps for change were not taken in this scenario for the overall success of the operation within the organization.

Reference
Weiss, J.W. (2016). Organizational Change (2nd ed.) [Electronic version]. Retrieved from https://content.ashford.edu/ (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.

Wk 4 Discussion 2:

Response 1(C. Wonah)

Organizational changes affect the organization in many ways including its competitiveness, its growth, its efficiency, and even its survival (Dobrovic & Timkova, 2017). Resistance to change, cultural impediments to change, and failure to sustain change are a few factors that impact change and cause its failure.

Resistance to change occurs in many ways, from foot-dragging and inertia to petty sabotage to outright rebellions. The less the employees know about the change and its impact on them, the more fearful they will become. No one likes to be taken by surprise. Lack of preparedness causes employees to resist because of the surprise and the unknown.

Cultural impediment to change is another factor of failure of organizational change. Employees are not willing to give up leaders’ dominant values assumptions, and norms. Employees are afraid of new cultural meanings, languages, symbols, and experiences (Weiss, 2016).

Failure to sustain change can also impact organizational change and cause its failure. This happens when people like to keep the status quo. The agents who are supposed to apply the change maintain the old bureaucratic and functional mindset (Weiss, 2016).

The five pillars that can cause an organizational change to succeed are the leadership, the strategy applied to implement the change, the culture that supports the change, the structure upon which the change is built, and the systems that help the change to be effective.

The example of organizational change failure that comes to my mind is Blockbuster. Just in 2004, the company was bringing in $6 billion in revenues and Netflix was struggling to stay in business. Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings, suggested that both companies work together with Netflix running Blockbuster’s brand online and Blockbuster promoting Netflix in its stores (Lepsinger, 2017). Of course, Blockbuster refused. Instead of accepting the proposals from Netflix and opening up to change in the way customers preferred to watch movies, Blockbuster focused on maintaining the status quo, doubling down on physical stores and inventory. By the time the leadership realized the mistake, it was too late (Lepsinger, 2017).

Most of the pillars described in our text are missing here and that explains the failure of Blockbuster. In my opinion, one of the pillars that is lacking here is leadership. As noted by our text, leaders work to find and place the right people in the right places and let the wrong people go before setting a new vision and strategy (Weiss, 2016). The leaders of Blockbuster were unable to apply this principle. The other pillar lacking at Blockbuster is a strategy. Any company that doesn’t have a good strategy to detect its strengths and weaknesses fails. That’s what happened to Blockbuster.

References

Dobrovik, J. & Timkova, V. (2017, Dec. 1). Examination of factors affecting the implementation of organizational changes. Journal of competitiveness. Retrieved from http://eds.b.ebscohost.com.proxy-library.ashford.edu/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=5&sid=4ece76dc-520b-4dde-b042-da3905dfe7a3%40pdc-v-sessmgr02 (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.

Lepsinger, R. (2017, Aug. 14). 3 Companies that failed to adapt, and where they went wrong. Retrieved from https://www.business2community.com/business-innova…

Weiss, J.W. (2016). Organizational Change (2nd ed.) [Electronic version]. Retrieved from https://content.ashford.edu/

Response 2: (B. Draper)

Even with the right intentions in mind and when its beneficial for the organization, change will not always go as planned nor will it always successful. There are many factors that may cause change initiative to fail. Our text identified the following reasons why organizational change programs fail: opposition to change, failure to recognize the need for change, superficial recognition of the need for change, failure to systematically implement change, short-term fix approach, structural impediments to change, cultural impediments to change, failure to sustain change. Our text also identified the five pillars that can cause change initiatives to succeed. The pillars include leadership, strategy, culture, structure, and systems.

An organization that failed to adapt was Toys R Us. Instead of creating its own website it entered an agreement with Amazon to be the exclusive vendor of toys for Amazon. When that agreement went sour it left Toys R Us playing catch up in the e-commerce business. A couple factors that I recognized were failure to recognize the need for change and short-term fixes. Toys R Us was founded in 1948 and the dot-com bubble was in the late 90s. So Toys R Us operated nearly 50 years one way and when they finally realized they needed the internet they decided to go through a third party instead of a in house e-commerce business.