The Importance of a Communication Strategy to the HR Practitioner Planning And Manging Organisational Change - Essay Example

? HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT: THE IMPORTANCE OF COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES IN ORGANISATIONAL CULTURE AND CHANGE By Write Here Presented to: Write Professor’s Name Here Name of University City and State Date of Submission HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT: THE IMPORTANCE OF COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES IN ORGANISATIONAL CULTURE AND CHANGE Introduction Managing organisational culture and change constitutes a major professional practice domain of human resource professionals. They are required to focus on the dynamics of the organisation, “identify and develop resilient employees, understand the relationship between organisational culture and change, and embrace change models that can be used to positively impact the organisation” (Gilley and Maycunich, 2000 p.313). Good communication helps to reduce resistance to change, and promotes change. Communication strategy in corporate transformation is an area requiring investigation, state Wei and Qun (2010). The increased diversity in contemporary organisations necessitates communication across several boundaries including cultural and professional ones (Jones, Watson, Gardner et al, 2004). Human resource development processes are transforming to meet the challenges faced by organisations today, from competition, globalisation and continuous change in markets and technology. By enhancing key capabilities, organisations seek to improve their competitive advantage. Consequently a “flatter, less bureaucratic, more responsive organisation is emerging as the model for the future” (Gilley and Maycunich, 2007 p.7). Thesis Statement: The purpose of this paper is to critically review the importance of communication strategies in human resource management, for planning and managing organisational change and culture. The relevant theories will be examined. Changing Organisational Culture Conner (1992 p.164) defines organisational culture as “the interrelationship of shared beliefs, behaviours, and assumptions that are acquired over time by membersof an organisation”. According to Kotter (1996), culture refers to norms of behaviour and shared values among a group of people. Culture is shared, and creates cohesiveness among members of an organisation. “An organization's existing culture is the product of beliefs, behaviors, and assumptions that have in the past contributed to success” (Gilley and Maycunich, 2000 p.284). Human Resource Development professionals play a central role in the accomplishment of organisational culture change. This is reflected in the five steps to cultural change suggested by Ulrich (1997). These include defining and clarifying the concept of culture change; articulation of the reasons for culture change being central to business success; defining a process for assessing the current culture, the desired future culture, and the gap between the two; identifying alternative approaches to creating culture change; and building an action plan that combines several approaches to organisational culture change. The critical success factors necessary for building an action plan for implementing culture change consist of the following measures: leading change by the organisation first identifying a sponsor for the culture change effort, creating a shared need among the employees by explaining the requirement for organisational change, shaping a vision by communicating the desired outcomes of the culture change, mobilizing commitment by identifying key stakeholders to support the desired culture change, transforming organisational systems and frameworks, monitoring progress, and making the change last through reinforcement techniques (Ulrich, 1997). Beer and Nohria (2000) argue that the two opposing theories of organisational change are Theory E based on the creation of economic value and Theory O pertaining to the building of organisational capabilities for the long term. The two theories strengths and weaknesses are related to every dimension of the change process, including motivation, leadership, and compensation issues. The paradox of change can be resolved not by selecting one of the two processes, but by combining them. The strategies for implementing organisational change need to satisfy shareholders, and promote the development of lasting organisational capabilities. For strategic human resource development leaders, creating cultural change is a fundamental responsibility. Strategic human resource leaders are required to engage the company in a series of actions for the corporation to take steps towards accomplishing cultural change. Additionally, they assist organisations to define the current as well as the desired target culture. Moreover, they help the organisation to expose culture gaps. Strategic human resource development leaders “must prepare and implement culture action plans and coordinate culture change efforts” (Gilley and Maycunich, 2007 p.70). In the end they must measure results. These steps may not be required for every culture change. However, they form the basic process to be applied by the strategic human resource development leader of the future. Human Resource personnel often require foreign language capability. Culture, habits, tradition and frames of reference are essential factors for organisations to implement change. The future organisation must have a global culture and focus. To impact the culture of a business, human resource management are required to have the support of their employees, whose participation in the changes should be carried out progressively one step at a time. Further, the changes should align with the existing culture for ensuring continued stability. Additionally, managing a diverse workforce also poses a challenge for contemporary human resource managers. For example, in New Zealand, cultural diversity is a reality, with many foreigners employed by New Zealand corporations. This immediately raises the issue of how many managers have foreign language capability. The ability to speak or at least understand a foreign language can serve to improve communication in businesses (Du Plessis, Beaver and Nel, 2006). Differences in national cultures can affect attitudes and behaviours in the work environment. These characteristics gradually become a part of organisational cultures and systems. In the present-day global world, it is essential to study the impact of national cultures on organisational life. The influences are seen particularly in managerial values, leadership styles, teams, and HR policies and practices. On the other hand, whether there is a convergence or divergence of attitudes and behaviours in this area, is debatable, state Harris, Brewster and Sparrow (2003). The fundamentals of organisational change can be traced back to research conducted by Lewin (1951). Despite the development of other elaborate change models, the basic principles outlined in Lewin’s Model of Change appear to be the most suitable for planning organisational change towards improving business effectiveness. His three steps constituting the change process included unfreezing, moving, and refreezing. Unfreezing involves the conditioning of organisations for change and establishing ownership within the organisation. This activity creates momentum when decisionmakers, stakeholders, and influencers support each other to introduce change. Once organisations are ready for change, Human Resource professionals identify possible measures that would help the firm to maximise its developmental opportunities. Lewin (1951) states that these actions shift the organisational system from its current level of behaviour and operations to its new, desired level. The process of organisational redefining and reinvention to achieve the desired goals and objectives is the moving phase also referred to as transformation. The last phase of the change process is refreezing, or establishing equilibrium within the organisation. The human resource professional’s main focus during this stage is to help the organisation to reestablish itself towards achieving higher levels of performance. Communication Strategy is Crucial in Transforming Corporate Culture Significantly, communication has an important part in corporate culture change. Beer (1997) states that the following factors are vital for organisational change: coordination of all organisational functions and business units; employee commitment to continuous improvement; general management and leadership competence; creativity and entrepreneurship; and open communication. Organisations are putting in great efforts to acquire these capabilities in order to realign themselves and their human resource policies and practices with the new competitive environment. Thus, a corporate cultural revolution appears to be underway. According to Wei and Qun (2010), contemporary businesses are confronted with dynamic changes of the external environment, leading to a requirement for continuous innovation, strategic transformation and change as important factors in entrepreneurship. On the other hand, the failure rate of business change is considerable. For example, companies have been faced with serious problems due to the failure or poor outcomes from “almost three-quarters of process reengineering, overall quality management, or size reduction of organisations”. The causes of failure have been examined. Evidence from corporate reports reveal that the most common reason is neglect of corporate culture. “Therefore, changes in corporate culture directly determines the success of business change” (Wei and Qun, 2010 p.366). Communication plays a crucial role in the transformation of corporate culture, both promoting the change and helping to reduce resistance to change. For human resource development personnel, the management of transformation in organisational culture involves functioning as both cultural guardians and catalysts. Ulrich (1997 p.30) defines change as “the ability of an organisation to improve the design and implementation of initiatives and to reduce cycle time in all organisational activities”. Within this context, human resource professionals identify and and implement processes for achieving organisational change. Capacity for change is the basic outcome of management of transformation processes. As change agents, HRD professionals “need to facilitate a dialogue about values as they identify new behaviours that will help to keep an organisation competitive over time” (Gilley and Maycunich, 2007 p.40). Change agents identify and frame problems, build relationships of trust, solve problems, and create as well as fulfill action plans. Organisational communication can be explained with the help of social identity theory. According to this theory, individuals develop an identity within their organisation, which is comparable in nature and influence to identification with other social groups. “Social identities particularly related to work and professional contexts, become relatively stable parts of self-definition” (Jones, Watson, Gardner et al, 2004 p.738). Communication may be extremely group-specific with members sharing unique codes of communication. Social identity theory has now been found to theorize multiple identities which are highly relevant to communication in cross-functional and diverse work groups, and during organisational change processes. In large, multifaceted organisations, individuals may prefer to identify themselves with organisational work units rather than with the organisation as a whole. According to Haslam (2000), shared identity fuels motivation to communicate, and it provides a shared cognitive framework on which productive communication can be based. Significantly, however, the social identity theory explains intergroup relations, and is not a theory of intergroup communication. Hence, social identity theory is integrated with communication theories and methodologies such as critical discourse analysis. Thus, Gallois, Ogay and Giles’ (2004) Communication Accommodation theory developed to explicate the relationship between identity, context and communicative behaviour, helps to explain intergroup aspects of organisational communication. The strengths of communication accommodation theory are that it includes motivation, perceptions and behaviour, as well as intergroup and interpersonal aspects of talk, and that it can be applied across a broad range of contexts. Studies on communication between culturally or professionally diverse work groups (Haslam, 2000; Riedlinger, Gallois, McKay et al, 2004) pertain to social identity theory and communication accommodation theory, and the intergroup investigations have great potential (Jones et al, 2004 p.740). Communication in the organisation is the main instrment to initiate changes, and it is also a medium and goal of change. Communication can help to counter resentment or fear of the organisational changes to be implemented, and create optimism in relation to the transformations to be brought about. The principles or values that form the basis of organisational culture change should be drafted carefully and communicated throughout the organisation. Although a variety of media and technology may be used in values communication, it is essential that direct lectures should be given to encourage interactive discussions (Dolan and Castaneda, 1999). Cameron and Quinn’s (2011) theory of Competing Values Framework argues that the best way to communicate the future organisational culture is by the change team citing illustrative cases. These cases would describe the core values that the organisation should have in the future. This technique of introducing a new organisational culture is considered to be more effective than a graph, strategy, or sensational speech of a human resource professional. With progressive steps in the process delineated for every strategic action, in the fifth step interpretation and communication was advocated. Explaining the reasons and necessity for change, would lessen resentment and hesitation to adopt the planned organisational culture change. In order to build future-proof organisational cultures, there is emphasis on evolving from employee engagement to organisational authenticity for successfully achieving organisational culture change. This is based on two linked propositions: first, that trust has to be considerably deepened to create deep emotional loyalty by the creation of transparent, discussion-centred organisational cultures. The second is the need for corporations to treat staff in the same way as treating customers (CIPD, 2010). A strong conceptual and empirical understanding of two broad, communicative approaches for implementing change are Russ’ (2007) models: programmatic and participatory methods. The programmatic approach focuses on the transmission of monologic communication about organisational change in a top-down direction to create stakeholder compliance, and to motivate the required positive attitudes and beliefs about the planned change. On the other hand “the participatory approach leverages dialogic communication so as to involve most or all stakeholders through solicitation of their ideas and input” relating to the organisational culture changes, and its implementation. Russ (2007) argues that the two approaches are not mutually exclusive, and they may be combined together and implemented. The programmatic method of implementing organisational culture change has a number of communication models. The different names of the models include commander, edict, persuasion, and rule bound. These models share core characteristics. For example, they use highly centralised, controlled, and prescribed communication approaches to implement organisational change. The reason is that these models assume change to be most effective as a top-down approach, and there is very little organisational participation. Decision-making is in the hands of a few at the top of the organisation’s hierarchy. Additionally, little power is held by employees or those who may have expertise in the particular spheres of organisational change. Hence, when using these change models, organisational leaders clearly explain the main direction for the features that are to be changed and the technique by which they will be changed through the delegation of highly programmed tasks (Russ, 2007). The participatory models use divergent labels including participation, intervention, autonomous, adaptive, and crescive states Russ (2006). Still, they reveal core similarities, distinguished by varying levels of involvement and input from stakeholders from various organisational levels. Additionally, these models do not consider change as a static event. On the other hand, change is viewed as a dynamic process which is regarded as most effective when employees are flexible and adapt to events as they occur. Decisions on implementing change are frequently made by employees in an organisation’s lower echelons. In other cases, the various organisational levels collaborate together for implementing change optimally. Conclusion This paper has critically reviewed the transforming of organisational culture, and the importance of communication strategies in the management of organisational change and culture by human resource development personnel. Several relevant models and theories were examined. Theory E of economic value and theory O pertaining to the building of organisational capabilities for the long term were found to be best utilized in an integrated form. The Social Identity Theory believes that individuals develop an identity within their organisation, which is comparable in its characteristics and influence to identification with other social groups. The Communication Accommodation theory developed to clarify the relationship between identity, context and communicative behaviour, helps to explain organisational communication within and between groups in the firm. Lewin’s model (1951) related to unfreezing, moving, and refreezing, as three steps in organisational change was found to be an effective technique which continues to be popular. Cameron and Quinn’s (2011) theory of Competing Values Framework states that the best way to communicate the future organisational culture is by the change leaders explaining illustrative cases to employees of the organisation. A strong conceptual and empirical understanding of organisational change was based on two communication theories: Programmatic and Participatory. 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