Employees Affective Commitment to Change - Assignment Example

Employees’ affective commitment to change Summary of the article This article gives an understanding of the relationship between relationship management (CRM) and employees of an organisation. The literature is new in the entire gamut of CRM as very less study was being conducted regarding the relationship between CRM and employees. The relevance of this study lies in the fact that any kind of CRM activity will bring about a change in any or all of an organisation’s processes. Even before going into the details of the article, it is important to know what CRM means. “Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is an information industry term for methodologies, software, and usually Internet capabilities that help an enterprise manage customer relationships in an organized and efficient manner.” (Mariosalexandrou.com, 2010) The definition clearly states that CRM is all about implementing technology. Technology implementation leads to change in the process and it is very crucial that the employees of the organisation adapt to such changes. The previous concepts relating to it was Business Process Reengineering (BPR) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). “Reengineering is the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical, contemporary measures of performance such as cost, quality, service and speed.” (Muthu et.al, 1999) EPR is also another term that is closely associated with CRM. “ERP or Enterprise Resource Planning is simply the process of integrating all of a company’s data and processes into a unified structure or system by using the latest hardware or software technologies.” (Glenn, 2008) The article begins by stating the fact that most of the organisations give too much importance on technology, ignoring the people related issues. As per the sample selected for the study, successful CRM implementation happened only as a result of better people management. The employees are the one who are in the forefront during the delivery of any new processes. Therefore, every organisation should give a firm attention to organisational issues. The article states the fact that the decision regarding the same should be taken at the enterprise level. The article had focussed on employee commitment as the main determinant for the success of CRM. The idea was broken down into two research questions. The first one focussed on the importance of employee commitment to change for successful CRM and the second one on the organisational factors that contribute to commitment to the CRM induced change. The article has given a good review of the existing literature on CRM and related fields. The review of Deliberate and Emergent strategies gave a clear introduction to the study. Deliberate strategies are well planned strategies that are implemented at the strategic level in an organisation. They are otherwise known as intended strategies as there is clear intention of implementing such a strategy. An emergent strategy as the name signifies is emerged as a result of a continuous course of action. It involves detailed planning and better understanding of the present organisational context. The three process of an organisational change as identified by the article are planning change, implementing change and managing change. These three steps encapsulate everything that is related to a change in the organisation. Planning change is very crucial for the topic of discussion of the article. A change in the process will alter the way people work or are expected to work in an organisation. A careful planning will help to identify the present working styles and to execute a planned change. Implementing the change becomes very easier once the initial step is properly handled. A better planning process will make the implementation easier. Now the employees exactly know what changes needed to made in the way they work. As the first two steps are executed properly, managing the change is made easier. Proper and periodical follow-ups are done in order to make timely rectifications. The procedure of change model by Lewin’s (1951) and principles of effective frame bending by Nadler and Tushman (1989) were also focusing on the above three processes. Apart from these, the article has also reviewed various other literatures related to the change process. But basically all the process surrounded on the core areas of planning, implementing and managing. But the presence of various literatures helped to view the change process from various perspectives. The article did not limit itself by theories from organisational perspective but also from an individual perspective. Individuals of the organisation are referred to as change recipients. The article refers to Tetenbaum (1998) which states that people are at the core of change process. It is the people, whose decision of whether to accept or reject the change, that determines the success of a change process. The article reviewed theories that are related to the emotional state of the people in accepting a change. Every literature that are reviewed in the article sums up only one core idea, that is, a behavioural change is possible only when the employees are ready to accept the change in all respect. The second part of the background of the study states that study regarding the specific relationship between CRM and employees’ commitment were very few. As such this article will be one of the useful one to the arena of CRM and employee commitment. The research was conducted with an exploratory research design. Banking industry was chosen for conducting the research. Three of the top five banks in New Zealand were selected. The banking industry was chosen as it was one of the forerunners in information technology implementation. Technology has transformed the way banking was done. Interviews with the employees and managers of the three banks were taken for the study. The three banks that were selected had the major market share in the New Zealand banking industry. Interviews were semi structured and were conducted by only one person in order to reduce bias. The sole theme of the interview was CRM and its impact on organisation. 13 in-depth interviews were conducted in total. The interviews were examined by two methods. First one is an individual examination of each interview to understand each respondent’s opinion about the CRM in their bank. Second one is to identify the common patterns in the interview. Finally the interview theme was classified into three main areas. First is the role of employee commitment to CRM implementation. The second one focussed on the ways to quantify CRM success and the third the organisational conditions that aided CRM-Led change. The data collected from the interview were coded under the above three categories. Different themes were also used for the purpose of reporting the findings of the study. Frequency of occurrence of the themes in the interview was taken in order to classify the findings. The results of interview with Bank A showed that employees are having a mixed response to the system. The staff opined that the CRM implementation actually increased the workload without respective change in the compensation plan. This bank is the largest one in terms of the total assets. The Bank B was ranked as the first one in customer satisfaction for six consecutive years. The result shown by this sample was very positive. Employees and managers were positive about the impact of the CRM activity. Many employees of Bank B praised the new system as it is convenient for both customers as well as the employees. The employees of Bank C were highly dissatisfied regarding the CRM implementation. Around 80% of the employees were not happy about the implementation of CRM. As per the theme Bank B had commitment of employees to the change. The other two banks lacked the employee commitment. As such it can be noted that only Bank B employees were happy with the CRM implementation. The next theme was related to measuring the CRM process. Here also it was identified that employees of Bank B had a clear idea on how to measure the success of a CRM activity. Notable result is that majority of the employees pointed out customer satisfaction and loyalty as the top indicators of successful CRM implementation. The final theme was the organisational factors that will contribute to the employee commitment to change. The factors as identified by the research are organisational culture, facilitative leadership, cross-functional integration, training, communication, and technology. The article summarises by stating the case of Bank B over Bank A and C. The article concluded that CRM of Bank A and C were not successful as they were focussing only on the hardware and software of the process. Analysis of the research Any research paper is not a perfect one. There is always an area for improvement. The best way to look at it is to conduct a SWOT analysis of the paper. This research paper has conducted a good analysis of the relationship between CRM implementation and employee commitment in an organisation. A strength and weakness analysis of the research paper can be done in order to determine whether the research was an effective one. Strength: One of the most important strengths of this research is the topic itself. As mentioned earlier numerous researches has been conducted and studied in the area of CRM. But very few researchers studied the relationship between CRM implementation and employee commitment. But the core idea of this research paper is the relationship between CRM implementation and employee commitment. The acceptance level of employees in a successful implementation of CRM and the other factors contributing to them are studied in detail in this research paper. As such, this research paper will have a prominent place among the literatures of CRM. The findings of this study can be used for future studies as well. The fact that the researcher has given valuable suggestions for future studies authenticates the results of this research. The researcher clearly suggests that future studies should be focused on supporting the proposed CRM change management model. This research paper would be the base literature for such a research in future. Another most important fact about this research paper is the quality of the literature review. The researcher has reviewed many relevant literatures to formulate his research problem and to properly guide his study. The researcher reviewed many relevant models in the area of CRM. The review of Boulding et al. (2005) clearly said that there is lack of literature in the field of CRM and employee commitment. The review of Mintzberg’s deliberate and emergent strategy helped to identify where a CRM activity should be focussed on. The researcher identified that it should be implemented as a deliberate strategy and therefore needs to get proper directions from the strategic level. The literature review also contained Lewin’s “Procedure of Change Model.” Procedure of change model is one of the most important models in the area of CRM or BPR. It can be said that the researcher was keen in identifying the scenarios from both organisation and individual perspectives. The researcher reviewed various literatures regarding CRM from an employee’s or individual’s perspective. Change strategist, change implementer and change recipient are the three types of individual in a CRM implementation process. Knowing this classification has helped the researcher to classify the individuals properly for the purpose of the research. The research had very clear research questions formulated on the basis of these literature reviews. “A Research Question is a statement that identifies the phenomenon to be studied.” (Researchassistant, 2003)The first research question was to investigate the importance of employee commitment to change for successful CRM implementation. The second research question was to identify the organisational factors that contribute to employee commitment to CRM induced change. Both the research questions are interrelated. A research is half done when it has clearly defined research questions. This research is a success in that respect as it has two strong interrelated research questions. As the research questions were clear, further part of the research was clearly directed. The way the data has been analysed helped to present the results in an organised manner. In the findings, the researcher first gave the profiles of each of the bank before charting out the findings from these. This step helped to identify the scale of operations of each bank and to compare the results accordingly. After properly explaining the findings from each banks, the researcher then charted out theme wise findings. In the beginning, the researcher has classified the whole study into three themes. The results pertaining to each theme from each bank were explained here. This method was very effective. The most notable feature of this research is its structure. The research was well structured and it facilitated better understanding. There was a continuous flow and relationship between every parts of the research. The introductory portion of the research gave a clear understanding of what the researcher is going to discuss in the paper. It introduced the core topic Customer Relationship Management and related topics like Enterprise Resource Planning and Business Process Re-engineering. In the first paragraph of the introduction, the researcher introduces the problem. It states that over years, CRM activity has placed importance only on technology side and has ignored the people related issues. The researcher supports this view with the sufficient literatures. The researcher puts forward the suggestions of Boulding et al. (2005) and Zablah et al. 2004, that is, the role of employees’ role in CRM implementation is to be studied well. The researcher also identifies that CRM is not only about traditional marketing and sales as it used to be; instead it involves and impacts all the areas that are directly or indirectly related to the implementation of CRM. The structured flow of the content is also evident from the next part of the introduction where the objective and contribution of the research paper to the area is mentioned. In the next part the researcher mentions the two research questions. This sequence has helped the people to connect various parts and contents of the research. Weakness: Though the research paper had much strength, it also lacked certain important qualities of a good research. One of the most crucial limitations of the research was its narrowness. The paper focussed on only one industry and from one region alone. Banking industry is definitely one of the major and early implementers of CRM. But there are many other industries that have introduced highly sophisticated CRM process. Automobile industry is also one of the early adopters of CRM along with banking industry. (Cnet, 2002) “The potential payoffs for the industry are enormous. In general, good CRM drives out bad sales and marketing efforts and, according to David Nathanson, director of retail automotive operations for PricewaterhouseCoopers, those expenditures can reach 30 percent of the cost of a new car.” (Compton, 2000) Even airline industry is on the verge of implementing CRM process at a large scale. The results of this research cannot be generalised to industries other than banking. Banking is a service oriented area and the working conditions and CRM process of a bank differs greatly with other industries which are production oriented. Thus, whether the results of this research can or cannot be attributed to other industries is a question. May be a different research need to be conducted in the same manner for a production oriented business in order to test the result. Thus, one can arrive at industry wide differences in the CRM implementation process and influence on employee commitment. Another limitation of the research paper is that it was confined to few largest banks in New Zealand. There is a dual problem existing in this. First one is that the study was conducted only on the largest banks that represented major market share. There are even other smaller banks that had undergone CRM implementation but were not considered for the research. The second issue is that the result is related only to the banks in New Zealand. The individual and employee perception may vary from one region to the other. In the present era of globalisation no bank can survive without a proper CRM system. This means that banks from across the world have undergone CRM implementation at a large scale. In such a scenario, three banks in New Zealand is too small a sample as the findings cannot necessarily be same with the banks from across the globe. Another weakness of the research is that the study did not make an in-depth analysis of the situation. To understand the real impact of a CRM, a detailed investigation is required on various levels of project execution. It has not happened in this research work. The major stages of a CRM activity consist of pre-planning, planning, execution and post execution. All these activities are individually a complicated process consisting of various steps. The researcher has however studied only about the implementation stage of CRM and its impact on the employees. Employee commitment is also equally important in the processes prior to implementation. Opportunities for improvement: No research can be complete in terms of the findings that it puts forward in terms of the existing state of the topic. There is always a room for improvement. As any research, there are various opportunities for improvement in this research too. Opportunities for improvement arise as a result of the limitations or weakness of the research. As mentioned earlier, this research paper was narrow in terms of the scope. The researcher could have widened the scope of the research to either include various industries or to include various samples from the same industry. If the researcher includes samples from various industries the results of such a research can be authenticated for generalisation. That again requires a complete new research based on the existing model and themes. Thus there is ample opportunity for a detailed research or dissertation on the given area. The second option is to include various samples from the same industry. This will also help to increase the scope of the research within the given industry. The outcome of such a research will help to authenticate the results for generalisations in the banking industry. Another opportunity is that the researcher could develop a different model than the one that is used here. The current model focussed only on the dual aspects of employee commitment and organisational factors. Now that the researcher has identified the organisational factors that affect the successful implementation of CRM. A further research can focus on the relationship between employee commitment and any of the organisational factors, in implementing the CRM. The organisational factors as identified by the research are organisational culture, facilitative leadership, cross functional integration, training, communication and technology. One could take any of these factors and link it to employee commitment in implementing CRM. Among these factors, factors like organisational culture and communication are worth studying. CRM involves more communication with the customers than usual. This is a challenge to the organisation and employees as the employees will have to enhance their communication skills. In order to enhance the communication skills of the employees, the organisation will have to plan series of training activities. This will involve use of financial, human and technological resources. Therefore, the impact of CRM on the communication skills of employees is a topic worth studying. Works cited Mariosalexandrou.com, 2010. CRM Definition. [Online] Available at: http://www.mariosalexandrou.com/definition/crm.asp [Accessed 11 August, 2010] Subramanian, Muthu., Larry, Whitman., & S. Hossein, Cheraghi., 1999. Business Process Reengineering: A consolidated methodology. [Online] Available at: http://webs.twsu.edu/whitman/papers/ijii99muthu.pdf [Accessed 11 August, 2010] Godfrey, Glenn., 2008. Enterprise Resource Planning 100 Success Secrets: 100 Most Asked Questions. 1st ed. Emereo Pty Ltd Lewin, K., 1951. Field Theory in Social Science. Harper & Row, New York, NY. Nadler, D.A. and Tushman, M.L. (1989). Organizational frame bending: principles for managing reorientation, Academy of Management Executive, Vol. 3 No. 3, pp. 194-204. Boulding, W., Staelin, R., Ehret, M. and Johnston, W.J., 2005. A customer relationship management roadmap: what is known, potential pitfalls, and where to go. Journal of Marketing, Vol. 69 No. 4, pp. 155-66. Researchassistant, 2002. The Relationship Between the Research Question, Hypotheses, Specific Aims, and Long-Term Goals of the Project. [Online] Available at: http://www.theresearchassistant.com/tutorial/2-1.asp [Accessed 11 August, 2010] Cnet, 2002. The auto industry and CRM. [Online] Available at: http://news.cnet.com/The-auto-industry-and-CRM/2009-1017_3-917228.html [Accessed 11 August, 2010] Jason, Compton., 2002. The Auto Industry Gears Up for CRM. [Online] Available at: http://www.destinationcrm.com/Articles/Editorial/Magazine-Features/The-Auto-Industry-Gears-Up-for-CRM-46748.aspx [Accessed 11 August, 2010] Read More