Organization Change in Educational Institutions - Essay Example

Assigned to be an organizational consultant in the UK at the time of economic recession, I will then discuss about the organizational interventions in the educational sector which is now experiencing a continuous reduction in budget because of the global economic downturn. I propose that there will persist to be remarkable transformations in our region’s educational institutions and that the main issue to be resolved is whether intended change attempts will permit us to have a degree of control and power over these transformations and how they occur. Proposed organizational change persists to be an ignored field in practice and research in the educational institution, like it was in the 1980s. The concentration of majority of service providers remains the condition of corrective support to individual clients; taking into account of the big picture, which includes system-wide deterrence and intervention, frequently does not occur (Greve 2003). Several literatures associated to intended organizational change have emerged, but most are not aimed at important school practitioners such as guidance counsellors, teachers and administrators. In addition, hardly any books or articles on consultation published in the recent years include sufficient discussions of organizational consultation, in spite of the fundamental function that change at this discipline should fulfil in the educational transformation movement. Published evidence-based practice of the process is even more difficult to find. There have been a number of current developments, though, in the conceptual literature on organizational change that are more and more manifested in practice in educational institutions. For example, from the 1960s to the 1980s, organizational change embarks on largely concerned long-established organizational development frameworks in which either consultants or administrators had the primary function in developing and instigating change. Nowadays, though, such frameworks no longer seem to be as much fashionable (Harrison 1994), and a dissimilar body of components manifesting more collaborative attempts typifies effective intended-changed approaches. Further, there is a growing appreciation of the ecological perspective in which collaborative relationships between individual and small groups take place. Cases of various recent initiatives that demonstrate these developments will be discussed in this essay. I. Organizational Consultation in UK’s Educational Reform Movement The change process generally is conceptualized as including various interconnected common stages, each with its own assessment section. The stages are ‘diagnosis, planning, initiation, implementation and institutionalization’ (Fullan 1991: 39). In this mechanism, the participation of administrators almost at all times has been acknowledged as significant, but modern organizational interventions situate considerable focus on the active involvement of parents, teachers and even the society at large, in so doing guaranteeing their willingness for change and their dedication to the whole process. Undoubtedly, the ‘quality of the relationship that develops between a school and the community it serves determines to a large degree the success or failure of that school’ (Brubacher et al. 1994: 96). Moreover, educational institutions cannot be held entirely responsible for resolving dilemmas arising from the public at large that impact educational processes. Hence, the contribution of various constituencies assists in the assurance of more truthful problem analysis and intervention formulation. Continued administrative participation remains important, and change in general will not persist without such maintenance because managers usually steer organizational changes, even though consultants may help them. All parties influenced and affected by the change should collaborate to develop a definite conception of where the process is taking place, acknowledging that creation of a plan is a developmental mechanism. These attempts are more probable to be effective in organizations with an experience in collaborative work, in which trust is fully developed. Even though conflict and incongruity will occur, which are quite unavoidable, these concerns are resolved adequately so that there are no victors or victims. Last, effective transformation attempts involve definite plans, derived from the launching of the process, for simplification and institutionalization. What is possibly noteworthy about this account of the process, nonetheless, is that it does not take account of discussion of financial support to sustain the transformation. However, we have oftentimes observed that monetary considerations and finances take up a top position in most discourses on educational change. A primary point made in this organizational consultation, and one that needs repeating, is that strategic transformation schemes should reflect the intricacy of the organizations they are attempting to transform. Sufficient effort should be dedicated to amassing diagnostic information, to evaluating organizational readiness, and to updating the implementation procedure. It is my observation that several educational changes become unsuccessful because they are one-dimensional and fail to consider the interactive components of organizational structure, system and behaviour. Organizations should not be viewed as separate, static units. Moreover, enduring, significant transformation entails a lot of time, typically at least 2 to 3 years until it is institutionalized (Kezar 2001). Efforts to rush the entire process may be met with conflict, resistance and failure. Nevertheless, it is common to see schools hurriedly assuming on one change scheme after another in reaction to the demanding social conditions impacting them or the most recent onslaughts from legislators, the mass media, the public, or the academic vocation itself. As a result, the continued attempt and dedication needed for successful change may not be applied. For these grounds, it is unsurprising that important organizational change and restructuring have taken place only is secluded areas rather than on an extensive basis. I still view consultation capabilities such as problem solving, initiating cooperative activities, and interpersonal communication, and the associated knowledge of the transformation facilitation procedure as components crucial to organizational interventions. Several change programmes experience difficulties because the consultant did not possess the adequate skills and experience to organize and assimilate people around the change mechanism at first and over the long term. Transformation was either not established or not maintained. Furthermore, expansion on conventional client-focused consultation frameworks may be necessary. Service delivery approaches such as intervention aid may as well demand consultants to endeavour in mental health partnership. Specifically, a direct service constituent can be integrated to complement the indirect service function, in so doing further amending the educational system of service delivery through more actively involving consultants in performing interventions. It also is turning out to be increasingly apparent that another fundamental component is small-group team improvement. Change proposals that orient substantial energy on this programme have the greatest opportunity to success. The intricacy of change in educational institutions is such that in general it is impractical to anticipate creating large-scale changes at once (Mills 2003). Development takes place when small steps are taken to enlarge the number of individuals involved. Hence, independent work teams are turning out to be the groundwork for change, and consultation is turning out to be the process by which they are facilitated to collaborate. II. Potential Organizational Change Initiatives in UK’s Educational Sector One model of a potentially ground-breaking transformation in UK schools, specifically among those providing students who are impoverished, is the full-service school approach. Massive population of children are endangered by a diversity of morbidities, numerous have critical psychiatric problems, abuse substances such as alcohol and drugs, commit interpersonal aggression, or have unsafe sexual contacts. Nevertheless, the mainly segmented, independently organized, repetitive, physically sporadic services intended toward these children are exceptionally complicated to access. Moreover, their emphasis has a tendency to be on the cure and treatment of children rather than on early intervention courses serving great numbers of students. The organizational change needed to set up, organize, and sustain full-service school-associated connections is considerable, but already such delivery systems of service are present in places all over the region. Among the features of the movement that have to be explored is certification of outcomes. The assessment issues are particularly challenging, but nonetheless, they should be embarked on to evaluate how well these plans operate because these processes are being put into effect more frequently. Another case of an organizational innovation that has been implemented rapidly in educational institutions is intervention assistance programs (Zins et al. 1988). This program includes the system-wide implementation and condition of consultation and intervention processes as a way of addressing the academic and emotional requirements of all students in spite of classification. Their effective implementation characterizes an essential transition in how student-related difficulties are met and how resources are distributed. Several human-service institutes, even though not frequently schools are taking up a Total Quality Management (TQM) approach. According to Sashkin and Kiser (1992), TQM …means that the organization’s culture is defined by and supports the constant attainment of customer satisfaction through an integrated system of tools, techniques and training. This involves the continuous improvement of organizational processes, resulting in high quality products and services (p. 25). The fundamental rules of this change framework include institute a collective vision, operate on team work and improved teambuilding, assess the process, appraise information through measurement, establish trust and empower people. This movement gives some organization for change initiatives. A primary finding surfacing from research on this framework, which should be unsurprising, is that it necessitates long-term dedication to succeed, and maintaining change is difficult (Harrison 1994). III. Organizational Change in UK’s Higher Education The necessity for longer time frames in analyzing organizational change in higher education: the prevailing organizational theories of change in higher education have put emphasis on their intrinsic incremental character. In the recent decades, the ‘open systems’ theory of organizational change, which grounds its conceptualization of the favourability of gradual adaptation on an analogy of biological survival, has been boosted by more new theories that have prevailed upon research on the processes of decision-making and transformation in educational contexts. Universities are seen as structured revolutions, which have a constitution that is best depicted as slackly coupled. Both of these features result into the devolution of decision making, restricted influence of leaders, and limited adjustment within subdivisions. Explorations on strategic outcomes in smaller universities might have been perceived as contesting this prevailing theoretical notion but did not lead to considerable reconfiguration within educational research (Geisler 1999). My assessment indicates that those points of view are expressive of the historical stage in which universities take benefit from flourishing development that was made possible by an anarchic focus to strategy and an extremely decentralized system. As Miller and Friesen (1980) stated, when organizations locate a strategic direction that originally provides them gains, they normally tend to remain in similar course. Hence, for instance, the emergence of the ‘multiversity’ during the post-war years generated a big, insecurely related venture that was, by internal and external criteria, dramatically thriving at both mass education and the generation of first-rate research. Nevertheless, as the framework change model discussed above indicates, following an effective process over a long period of time poses surpluses that transform originally successful configurations into irregularities that cannot be dealt with by more of the common or by sustaining similar theories regarding the fundamental nature of higher education. The United Kingdom in the mid-1980s witnessed the initiation of a paradigmatic shift away from slack connection and organizational revolution and toward more reduced and organized structural orientations (Greve 2003). The putting into effect of this paradigm shift is apparently imperfect. The repercussions of the interpretive model are important for administrative and for organizational theory. They entail, for instance, that actual organizational transformation demands leadership techniques that put emphasis on interpretation of organizational principles and significance rather than highlight organizational reform and administrative power. Leaders, for instance, should become successful narrators rather than absolute rulers, and should learn to become leaders as well as managers in the sense that they should surrender the hope that they can individually influence and control the fate of the organization. Managing significance is a substantially dicier attempt than conventional functions of leadership would propose. The necessity to reconsider the function of strategic formulation: Regardless what the strategic organization and planning frameworks presuppose, change is a greatly decentralized though community-based affair. Change that is coordinated from the top and which represents the vision or personal realities and interests of an elite group cannot characterize an institution-wide transformation mechanism unless it considers the alternative conflicting models that have usually arose in various sections of the organization. Strategic planning can be effective superficially, specifically in smaller colleges, where collective dialogues regarding assumptions and principles are simpler to handle. It is not, per se, capable to motivating changes in ideals of action, contextual assumptions, and allegories and symbols that comprise the organizational framework. Without integrating the importance of these forces in a large-scale change process, strategic planning will be unable to deal with the disorganized and erratic stages of change that are typical of more intricate, decentralized universities such as research-rigorous ones. In concurrence with the above discussion, my analysis of educational organizations of the UK at the time of economic recession indicates that transformation is evolutionary and revolutionary. I think that traditional strategic formulation and transformation strategies may be exceptionally valuable as instruments for devising changes within big institutions during a period of normalcy, but can be less useful when there is a demand for transformation of socially constructed meanings all over the organization. Nonetheless, the analysis in this essay discloses that even obviously easy intentions of change in organizations are profoundly linked through the paradigm to more complicated, unspecified targets of the transformation process such as the necessity to alter profoundly embraced beliefs regarding the definition of populism. Moreover, strategic management and planning frameworks hold a mainly impractical argument regarding the change capacities of the present management in organizations. Several of the managerial as well as strategic planning frameworks are one-shot recommendations to resolve dilemmas in organizations, which can be implemented once again every few year, but are not thought to be enduring. The change paradigm meant by this essay supposes an uninterrupted change attempt enduing for several years, for the reason that the process of experimenting on new meanings cannot be detached into periodic planning attempts. IV. Conclusions It appears obvious that it is more complicated to mobilize transformation in schools internally. Educational institutions respond to adjustments in their external environment more vigorously. A more positive and active role has obvious advantages. Recently, though, there have been massive changes in the points of view of the larger society of the efficiency of every human-service organizations. Particularly, several government-sponsored programs are perceived as money cavities, and appeals for reduced costs with similar qualities of service and enhanced liability have become sharp. Some communities have privatized a number of their schools as a way of provoking change and advance the management of educational services. In some areas, there is prevalent concern in dealing out the services of support staffs such as guidance counsellors, occupational therapists and other professional. Professional organizations have been immediate in their response to such attempts, but sustained reinforcements in such actions appear indispensable. Throughout time, public educational institutions may even investigate some kind of controlled competition, such as those that have been tried in social services and health care. In this setting, professional organizations as well may have to investigate their statuses because growing numbers of their constituents are endeavouring into and even launching contractual agreements. Remarkable change is taking place within our educational institutions. There is sufficient reason to consider that reform attempts will endure, and consequently, vast opportunities to become involved will be available. References Brubacher, J. et al. (1994), Becoming a Reflective Educator, Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin. Collins, D. (1998), Organizational Change: Sociological Perspectives, New York: Routledge. Cunningham, J. B. (1993), Action Research and Organizational Development, Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers. Dalton, G. W. (1970), Organizational Change and Development, Homewood, IL: Richard D. Irwin. Fullan, M. (1991), The New Meaning of Educational Change, New York: Teachers College Press. Geisler, E. (1999), Methodology, Theory and Knowledge in the Managerial and Organizational Sciences: Actions and Consequences, Westport, CT: Quorum Books. Greve, H. R. (2003), Organizational Learning from Performance Feedback: A Behavioral Perspective on Innovation and Change, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Harrison, M. (1994), Diagnosing Organizations: Methods, Models and Processes, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Kezar, A. J. (2001), Understanding and Facilitating Organizational Change in the 21st Century: Recent Research and Conceptualizations, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Miller, D. et al. (1980), Momentum and Revolution in Organizational Adaptation, Academy of Management Journal , 591-614. Mills, J. H. (2003), Making Sense of Organizational Change, New York: Routledge. Miner, J. B. (2002), Organizational Behavior: Foundations, Theories and Analyses, New York: Oxford University Press. Presthus, R. (1962), The Organizational Society: An Analysis and Theory, New York: Knopf. Sashkin, M. & Kiser, K.J. (1992), Total Quality Management, Seabrook, MD: Ducochon. Zins, J. et al. (1988), Helping Student Success in the Regular Classroom: A Guide to Developing Intervention Assistance Programs, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Read More