Organizational Capacity for Change in the UAE Government Sector - Research Proposal Example

ORGANISATIONAL CAPACITY FOR CHANGE IN THE UAE GOVERNMENT SECTOR Student’s Name: Code + Course name Professor’s name University City, State Date Drivers of Organisational Capacity for Change in the UAE Trustworthy Leadership The UAE government sector has ranked highly on trustworthy leadership. There is a positive correlation between trustworthy leadership and organisational capacity for change. The fact that the UAE government sector has reiterated the need for leaders to put the welfare of the society before individual interests explains the high levels of trust in the leaders of the institutions in the country. Leaders in the UAE are ready to sacrifice for the benefit of the society (Gutcher 2012). Placing such leaders in institutions guarantees trust among employees. As a result, such leaders can easily convince employees to accept incremental changes within the organisations as opposed to situations where the leaders lacked trust from the employees. People The UAE government sector understands the role that people play in the growth of institutions. The UAE government understands that inspiration and training is detrimental to the success of employees in its institutions. Training and inspiring leaders and employees exhibits a positive relationship with organisational capacity for change. Therefore, the government inspires and trains its employees on a regular basis (Hainey 2015). The inspiration and training program majorly involves leaders. The government tasks the leaders with the responsibility of disseminating the same knowledge to junior employees in the organisation. The programme entails asking leaders to come up with creative ideas, granting leaders autonomy and choice to carry out their roles, and showing care to leaders. Reciprocating the training to junior employs motivates them towards having a positive attitude towards the change process in the organisation. Organisational Culture In order to guarantee the acceptance of continuous incremental changes in an organisation, it is imperative to cultivate the learning culture among individuals of the organisation. The absence of a learning culture is a crucial determinant of change resistance within an organisation. The UAE has witnessed rapid changes and developments that have placed performance management of the public sector as one of the areas that requires utmost consideration. The national culture comprises of the assumptions, beliefs, and values that the nationals learn from their childhood and hold onto them until their adulthood as well as in the workplace (Almulla 2012). On the contrary, a culture that advocates for dedication to workplace roles exhibits a positive relationship with organisational capacity for change. Organisation culture entails the new behaviours and beliefs that organisations teach new employees and expect them to follow while carrying out their roles in the workplace. The UAE government has managed to instil effective corporate culture into its employees in a bid to achieve improved performance. Infrastructure The UAE is one of the countries in the entire world that boasts of well-developed infrastructure. The focus of the government on infrastructure development has granted government institutions an opportune window to exhibit exceptional performance since the institutions have the entire required infrastructure at their disposal. Favourable infrastructure exhibits positive relationship with organisational capacity for change. The UAE Vision 2021 and the UAE’s Green Growth Strategy target to make the UAE to be among countries with the best infrastructure across the globe (UAE Interact 2017). The existence of such infrastructure have given government institutions all they require in terms of infrastructure to develop. In order to embrace new technologies that make use of the already installed state-of-the-art infrastructure, firms only need to train its employees that would be the users of the technology in delivering services to the public. Resources It is evident that a positive correlation exists between the championing of resources and organisational capacity for change. The human resource or labour aspect of firms in the UAE government have contributed immensely to the success of the economy. The migrant workers that account for the majority of experts in the UAE are responsible for the rapid economic development and the glamorous cities that are evident in its emirates. In almost all aspects of the UAE economy, migrant workers form a significant part of its development (Randeree 2009). It is evident that the country has managed to tap cheap foreign labour from Asian countries and other nations across the globe. As a good attraction to foreign nationals in search of employment, the UAE has capitalised on the advantage to attain high levels of economic and infrastructural development. Learning An increase in the capacity of the organisation to learn leads to a subsequent enhancement of the organisational capacity for change. The UAE government understands that learning is a crucial driver of the success of its firms. The government understands that the constantly changing business environment requires firms to go beyond the effective processing of information to the creation of knowledge and information that would enhance growth (Hernaus et al. 2008). As a result, the government has decided to analyse its institutions and firms based on their ability to create and process information as a crucial driver to success. As a result, public firms also need to be learning organisations in order to understand the outside environment and create effective strategies that would drive their growth in the industry. Challenges of Organisational Capacity for Changes among UAE governmental sector Trustworthy Leadership Even though the UAE has exhibited sterling performance on the trust of employees and the society on leaders and businesses, it is evident that the trust on leaders has declined amidst the rise in the trust in businesses. Employees and the society have indicated self-interest as the prime reason for the decline of trust in leaders (Gutcher 2012). Some leaders have contravened the corporate culture of serving the needs of the society to being self-centred; an act that has eroded the initial trust they enjoyed from employees and the public. This presents a significant challenge to the continued success of government firms in the UAE since employees would start feeling that the change initiatives are for the benefit of the leaders only. People It is clear that the UAE government has endeavoured to inspire and train the leaders of its governmental institutions to guarantee the successful performance of institutions in the sector. However, the government has encountered a significant challenge in filtering the strategy and vision of organisations to junior employees. In most organisations, leaders and other employees at management positions are the only people that understood the vision and strategy and feel inspired. However, the degree of inspiration drops among junior employees (Hainey 2015). At the bottom of the organisation, managers only tell people the roles to carry out without explaining their contribution to the vision and strategy of the firm. The result is reduced motivation among people that would turn out to be an impediment to the success of continuous incremental changes that take place in the organisations. Organisational Culture It is clear that the UAE government sector has encountered negative effects of the Arab culture portrayed by its nationals in government institutions. For instance, Muslims pray five times a day according to the Arab culture. On two occasions in a single day, the prayer time coincides with work time (Almulla 2012). In such cases, Muslim workers have to leave their workstations and head to prayer stations located either within the organisation or outside. Moreover, the Quran directs Muslims to love their families. The directive has compelled Muslims to place their families before work. In essence, the Arab culture “eats” into work hours thereby having an adverse impact on the productivity of the employees. Some of the adverse effects of the culture in the implementation of incremental change would be the need to spend more time in learning new systems as opposed to cases where employees would be devoted fully to their roles in the organisation. Infrastructure Even though the UAE government has strived to avail the entire needed infrastructure to catalyse development in the country, it is evident that the UAE runs out of the technologies and expertise required to exploit the full potential of its infrastructure. The UAE government has opted to outsource expertise required to overcome the challenge at higher costs. Technologies of dealing with the water shortage problem have remained to be an issue of concern to the government since the country’s high demand of the commodity has caused the rapid depletion of the existing water sources. Currently, the government is facing the challenge of developing seawater desalination technologies that are energy efficient (UAE Interact 2017). In a similar way, institutions in the government sector are unable to exploit the full potential of the existing infrastructure because of the lack of expertise. The result is the reduced pace of the development of the economy of the country. Resources It is clear that the UAE has failed to motivate its foreign workers that account for a significant proportion of its economic development. Approximately 88.5% of the workforce in the UAE comprises of foreign nationals. The foreign employees work in both private and public institutions. As a result, the UAE government faces the threat of retarded economic growth and development in the event that its foreign workers decide to leave the country. This calls for the need for the government to train its nationals that would cover the gap created by the exit of the locals (Randeree 2009). Another alternative is the use of incentives such as higher wages, on-the-job-training, and career and development programs to retain the existing employees from foreign countries. Learning Creating a learning organisation from the traditional setup of organisations that focused on the processing of the already available information has turned out to be a hurdle to the UAE government. Consequently, the government has to encounter the challenge of developing effective training and development programs as well as the changing of the culture of its employees from the traditional Arab culture that does not encourage long hours of working to a culture that encourages active participation in the organisation’s roles. Even though firms in the UAE compete favourably with their western counterparts on many aspects (Wilkins 2001), it is clear that companies in the West invest massively on training and development to create a diverse and efficient workforce. Hypothesis Testing Testing the hypothesis will entail the use of multiple regression analysis to identify the effects of the six variables on the organisational capacity for change in the UAE government sector. The multiple regression analysis will also consider the sub-concepts of each variable and their interactions with the capacity for change in the UAE government sector. This presents a high probability for multicollinearity since the study entails the use of the regression equation for both main variables and sub-concepts. As a result, testing the hypothesis will require the use of the mean-centring approach that involves the use of mean-centred values of the variables and their associated interactions. The hypotheses for the study are as follows: H1: There exists a positive correlation between trustworthy leadership and organisational capacity for change in UAE government sector. H2: Training and inspiring leaders and employees is positively related to organisational capacity for change. H3: Organisational culture is positively related to organisational capacity for change. H4: The existence of favourable infrastructure enhances the organisational capacity for change in UAE government sector. H5: The championing of the resources of an organisation is positively correlated to organisational capacity for change. H6: The greater the capacity of an organisation to learn, the greater its capacity for change. The Conceptual Framework Factors affecting organisational capacity for change in the UAE government sector Trustworthy leadership determines the organisational capacity for change since it entails organisational setups where managers place the interest of the society and employees above their interests. The proper training of people in the organisation enhances their readiness towards accepting change. An organisational culture that advocates for the dedication of employees to workplace activities enhances the capacity of the organisation for change. The existence of interdependent systems within an organisation is a mandatory prerequisite for the organisation’s capacity for change. The ability of the organisation to train its employees on the use of new systems or adopt easy-to-use systems enhances the organisational capacity for change. Finally, a learning organisation exhibits a higher likelihood of undergoing a successful change process as compared to an organisation whose culture does not advocate for continuous learning as shown in the chart below. Figure 1: Factors affecting organisational capacity for change Reference List Almulla, A., 2012. The Impact of Culture in Performance Evaluation Procedure in the UAE Public Sector (Doctoral dissertation, University of Gloucestershire). Gutcher, L., 2012. Belief in leaders all comes down to trust. The National. Available from: https://www.thenational.ae/business/belief-in-leaders-all-comes-down-to-trust-1.382034 Hainey, I., 2015. UAE Government takes initiative to inspire and train leaders. The National. Available from: https://www.thenational.ae/business/uae-government-takes-initiative-to-inspire-and-train-leaders-1.109786 Hernaus, T., Škerlavaj, M. and Dimovski, V., 2008. Relationship between organisational learning and organisational performance: The case of Croatia. Transformations in business & economics, 7(2), pp.32-48. Randeree, K., 2009. 2009 Issue 1 Emiratisation: Research and Practice in Human Resource Management. UAE Interact., 2017. Infrastructure. Available from: http://www.uaeinteract.com/business/infrastructure.asp Wilkins, S., 2001. International briefing 9: Training and development in the United Arab Emirates. International Journal of Training and Development, 5(2), pp.153-165. Read More