5.1 Barriers to Organizational Change and Innovation.ppt

Lecter note

1. Barriers to Organizational Change and
Innovation
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Chapter Five

2. Brainstorming Questions
1)Why Do Change Initiatives fail?
2)Why people resist to change? How resistance to
change can be minimized?
3)Is resistance to change produce a positive or
negative consequences?
4)Hw do resistance to change should be handled for
good reasons?
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3. But what are reasons for failure of change initiatives ?
Research indicates that two-thirds of all
organizational changes fail to achieve
their intended goals. This represents a
tremendous cost to organizations in
money, resources, and time.
The failure of most change initiatives
have been attributed to several factors.
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4. Many literature on change management shows that
Major reasons for the failure of change:
1)Inadequate culture-shift .
2)Lack of employee involvement and resistance to
change and its management: due to lack of incentives
tied to the change initiative and a lack of effective
training ( un-aligned workforces).
3)Flawed communication strategies.
4)Lack of consistent leadership
5)Lack of capacity: budgets, human resources.
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5. Lack of consistent leadership
A lack of commitment from the leader/change
master is one of the most common reasons for the
failure of change programs.
Commitment from senior management is required
if the change program is to succeed.
Leaders must reveal their values through their
actions, not their words. Therefore, employees infer
what is important from management’s behavior.
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6. Absence of incentive mechanism
Often change programs are initiated without changing
incentives to reinforce the desired new behaviors.
The organization must publicly recognize and reward
employees who changed towards the desired end
goals by linking promotion and pay rewards to the
desired behaviors.
Rewards that reinforce the old methods must be
eliminated.
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Absence of incentive mechanism

7. Absence of aligned work force
Another cause of failure is that too little
attention is given to developing the skills people
require to make necessary adjustment and
adoption of new environment.
The organization must develop experiential
training that provides real time hands-on
experience with new processes and procedures.
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8. Inadequate Culture-shift Planning
Most companies are good at planning changes in
reporting structure, work area placement,
responsibilities, and administrative structure.
Organizational charts are commonly revised again and
again. Timelines are established, benchmarks are set,
transition teams are appointed, etc.
Failure to foresee and plan for resultant cultural change,
however, is also common. When the planning team is too
narrowly defined or too focused on objective analysis and
critical thinking, it becomes too easy to lose sight of the
fact that the planned change will affect people.
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9. Even at work, people make many decisions
on the basis of feelings and intuition.
When the feelings of employees are
overlooked, the result is often deep
resentment/offensive because some
unrecognized taboo or tradition has not
been duly respected.
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10. Lack of Employee Involvement.
People have an inherent fear of change. In most
strategic organizational change, at least some
employees will be asked to assume different
responsibilities or focus on different aspects of
their knowledge or skills.
The greater the change a person is asked to make,
the more pervasive that person's fear will be. More
important, however, there will be fear of failure in
the new role.
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11. Involving employees as soon as possible in the
change effort, letting them create as much of the
change as is possible and practical is key to a
successful change effort.
As employees understand the reasons for the
change, they more readily accept and support the
change.
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12. Flawed Communication Strategies.
Ideal communication strategies in situations of
significant organizational change must attend to the
message, the method of delivery, the timing, and the
importance of information shared with various parts of
the organization.
Many leaders believe that if they tell people what they
(the leaders) feel they need to know about the change,
then everyone will be on board and ready to move
forward.
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13. In reality, people need to understand why the
change is being made, but more importantly,
how the change is likely to affect them.
People want to hear about change from their
direct supervisor.
A strategy of engaging direct supervision and
allowing them to manage the communication
process is the key to a successful change
communication plan.
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14. There are other barriers, but the outlined above are
extremely common and highly likely to create
havoc in the organization.
By planning and dealing with these areas
thoroughly, carefully, and sensitively, people will
be most likely to get in change and help implement
the change and adapt to organizational change far
more readily and supportively.
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