Achieving Successful Organization Change - Essay Example

Human Resource as a change agent has the following role in operational effectiveness: managing culture change processes; facilitating teams and groups to implement change; and identifying change agents within the organization (Wapshott & Spicer, 2005). The Human Resource functional competencies are perhaps more widely known to include Human Resource Planning and Staffing; Performance management and development; employee and labor relations; compensation and benefits; health, safety, welfare, and security; systems information and management; and organizational design and development (Brewster, Farndale, & Ommeren, 2000).

Man as a social animal finds it hard to exist in relative peace without any form of organization. Without organization chaos normally ensues, formal or informal, organizations exist in one form or another to provide order in society. In Britain and the rest of the industrial world today, it is almost impossible to imagine life without the plethora of organizations that comprise and make possible our everyday life (Burnes, 2004). Organizations being composed of different individuals and personality is in constant flux and thus are prone to influences that can bring an enormous amount of change in every minute of their existence (Alfes, Truss, & Gill, 2010).

Impermanence and transience are increasingly becoming important features of modern life brought about by major expansion in the scale and scope of change and the accelerating pace of change (Hayes, 2002). Individual change is at the heart of everything that is achieved in organizations. Once individuals have the motivation to do something different, the whole world can begin to change (Cameron & Green, 2009). By any objective measure, the amount of significant, often traumatic, change in organizations has grown tremendously over the past two decades.

Although some people predict that most of the reengineering, outsourcing, restrategizing, mergers, downsizing, quality efforts, and cultural renewal projects will soon disappear, I think that is highly unlikely (Hadley, 2009). Powerful macroeconomic forces are at work here, and these forces may grow even stronger over the next few decades. As a result, more and more organizations will be pushed to reduce costs, improve the quality of products and services, locate new opportunities for growth, and increase productivity (Kotter, 1996).

In the book “The Heart of Change” an overview of an eight-step model for change was divided into three major groups: 1. Creating the climate for change; 2. Engaging and enabling the whole organization; and 3. Implementing and sustaining the change. The eight-step are 1. Increase urgency; 2. Build guiding teams; 3. Get the vision right; 4. Communicate for buy-in; 5. Enable action; 6. Create short-term wine; 7. Don’t let up; 8. Make it stick (Cohen, 2005). In the same book, two approaches to change were proposed: analysis-think-change and see-feel-change (Cohen, 2005).

Practically the Human Resource is at the start and end of the process (Kotter & Schlesinger, 2008). In the Eight-step model, the core and enabler for each step is the Human Resource organization. Life is in a state of constant flux, the same can be said about the organization. Some changes are major and some changes are insignificant, no matter how large or inconsequential the volume of change is, change transforms the organization forever.