Change Management

Last reviewed: February 2017

Abstract

“Change management” concerns the development of skills and perspectives among both individuals and organizations that facilitate adaptation to new circumstances. Change is a constant in life, whether internal (a change in perspective) or external (taking a new job, moving to a new house, trying a new restaurant), voluntary or involuntary. Organizations must continuously change in order to adapt to their environment; businesses must develop new products, hire new workers as people retire, and change their approach to respond to the pressure of new competitors.

Overview

Human beings tend to respond to change in one of two ways, actively and passively. A passive response is one in which a person allows outside forces to act upon him or her without attempting to influence the effects of those forces. This type of person is one that simply allows change to happen but does not try to avoid unpleasant consequences of those changes, nor does he or she expend any effort at attaining desirable consequences. Those who take an active approach to change, on the other hand, try to bring about changes that they consider positive and try to prevent or avoid changes they see as negative.

The active approach to change is based upon an understanding that change is inevitable, but also holds that individuals can guide the forces of change to better align them with their own needs or preferences (Cummings, Bridgman & Brown, 2016). The field of change management is based on an active response to change.

Another feature of change as it relates to human beings is that it can occur either internally or externally. Internal change may not be noticeable to anyone but the person affected, yet it can have a profound impact. Internal change could involve the acquisition of new knowledge, or a change in one’s emotions or beliefs. For example, a person who never had a desire to travel abroad might read a book about a distant country, and thereafter have a strong urge to visit that place. An indirect external change could occur when a person’s loses his or her job because their employer decides to relocate their office to another state. This is not something the employer did directly to the employee, yet the relocation still causes major changes in the employee’s life.

External change, on the other hand, involves something in a person’s environment acting upon that person either directly or indirectly. An example of a direct, external change would be a person getting into a car accident on the way to work and suffering a broken leg; as a result, the person would need to adapt to having limited mobility while the limb healed.

It is important to understand these different types of change, because change management can be defined as the deliberate effort to bring one or more individuals’ internal attitudes toward change into closer alignment with the changes happening to them and around them. As is often said, human beings cannot fully control the forces of change, but they can control the ways they react to change. The art of change management is in helping people to “go with the flow,” by seeing the benefits that change may bring (Donnelly & Kirk, 2015).

Further Insights

Experts in change management tend to describe four main qualities or properties that change has, and how a particular change manifests these properties has a major impact on the way that the change will be perceived by those who must deal with it. These properties are significance, scale, lifespan, and size.

Significance refers to how important the change is to the organization that is experiencing it. For example, if a business employing hundreds of people all over the world suddenly had to start using red paper clips instead of blue ones, most people in the organization would not consider the change to be very important in the grand scheme of things, even though it would be a change affecting every member of the organization on a permanent basis (Dąbrowska, Sielska & Zdanowska, 2014).

The lifespan of a change is nothing more than a way of describing how long the change is expected to last. Some changes are only short-term, temporary measures, such as being required to use the stairs while the elevator is being repaired, while other changes may be long-term or even permanent, such as the need to adjust one’s business practices in order to comply with new government regulations. An interesting observation from change managers is that people can often adapt to major changes if they know that the change is going to be necessary for a only short period of time and that after that period has elapsed, everything will go back to the way it was (Parlakkilic, 2013). For changes that are expected to last longer or be permanent, greater thought and planning must be put into preparation for the change, since the consequences of a misstep will be felt for a much longer period of time. Change management staff must be careful, however, so that they do not become so occupied with planning for every eventuality that they stop making progress on the broader change effort.

“Scale” and “size” are terms that at first blush appear to describe the same property, but in this context they have distinct meanings. The scale of change attempts to describe how much of an organization’s total resources (e.g., human, financial, physical) will be affected by the change. Some changes affect only a few individuals, while others might affect an entire department or even the whole organization. Size, on the other hand, is a measure of the magnitude of the change.

The best way to understand this idea is to think of the size of a change as how far from “normal” the change will require one to deviate. One might fairly ask how this quality differs from that of significance, discussed above. The answer is that the significance of a change tends to be a subjective matter, relying as it does on the interpretation of those experiencing it. Size, in contrast, is more of an objective measure that multiple, disinterested observers would be likely to agree on. When all four of these qualities are considered together, they offer a comprehensive description of what to expect from a particular change (Butler, 2016).

Issues

The topic of change management is often written about in the context of the field of information technology (IT). This is largely attributable to the rapid pace of change in computer hardware and software—new products and platforms come and go with great rapidity, requiring IT workers to continuously adapt to new situations. While this would be stressful enough on its own, those in the IT field must also take on the duty of training others in the new technology and helping them adapt to it. This dual role in change management is a source of great stress for IT staff, and contributes to the high rate of turnover in the field.

The field of information technology is fertile ground for the study of change management. One of the realizations that has emerged from the change management literature, and one which may account for the relative rarity of change management success stories in the IT field, is that change is not always a logical, linear process that proceeds in orderly stages. Many of the traditional models of change management seek to make change more comprehensible to managers by boiling it down to a series of steps, such as that captured by Kotter’s eight step process or the plan-do-check-act cycle.

In the real world, change is a force that operates in hugely complex and convoluted ways (Percy, 2016). One change event might begin and appear to be under control, only to have another change event arise and skew the direction of the first change. This process might continue almost randomly, making it difficult for any person or group to ascertain exactly what is going on, much less to try to direct events down a certain pathway. In situations such as this, change management begins to resemble chaos theory more than it does strategic leadership, because there are a large number of events and timelines intersecting with one another and causing additional changes, at each stage of the initial change process. Predicting how all of these events may influence each other quickly goes from challenging to nearly impossible (Van Wyk, 2015).

The example of IT highlights an interesting feature of change management: It is a discipline that largely consists of encouraging managers to perform their jobs more effectively. In other words, effective change management mostly involves doing a more effective job at the tasks that managers should already be doing, such as communication, listening, empathy, and collaboration.

The positive side to this realization is that change management does not require one to learn a whole new set of skills that are separate from one’s ordinary activities. Instead, it requires a new understanding of the impact a leader’s behavior has on how people perform their roles, and how adjustments in the leader’s behavior can facilitate the process of accepting change for others in the organization. With this understanding must also come a commitment to consistently practicing the behaviors that can have a positive influence on the general perception of change within the institution. This improves the chances that a change agent will be able to increase stakeholder buy-in for the change (Kumar et al., 2015).

Communication. Communication has been cited as the factor in change management that is more influential than any other. If communication about a change is handled well, it can make all the difference in whether a company or individual is able to cope with the situation. When communication either doesn’t happen or is problematic, then even a minor change can be blown out of proportion, misinterpreted, or otherwise deflected from a more promising outcome.

Communication can influence change management in two main ways. The first is the timing and frequency of the communication, which describes when the communication occurs in relation to events associated with the change. Does it occur before the change, during the change, or after the change? In too many cases, the pace of change gets away from those who are trying to manage it, and the change begins to unfold before managers have time to notify anyone that it is coming. This scenario can have extremely unfortunate consequences for all concerned, as people tend to become more anxious about and resistant to change when they are not prepared for its arrival (Rawlins, 2014). In addition, when management fails to adequately communicate about an impending change, this can cause confidence in the administration of the organization to wane, as people perceive their leaders as less competent or less prepared to deal with the rapidly shifting landscape.

Organization Core Values. One major obstacle that change management efforts must often overcome is related to the core values of the organization. These core values, whether they are actually written down somewhere and consulted from time to time or tacitly understood by everyone, are the basic beliefs and priorities that define an organization. If the organization, through its management, does not stay true to its values, then it risks being perceived as untrustworthy, superficial, or even duplicitous.

Similarly, if an organization changes its values too frequently, it may be viewed as inconsistent or not committed to its beliefs. This creates a problem during times of significant change, because those engaged in change management efforts must find a way to frame the change in such as way that it does not come into conflict with the organization’s values.

At the very least, effective presentation of change can involve a considerable amount of creativity in how the change is described to others. For example, if the change is a layoff of a large number of people from a company that has as one of its values “We take care of each other,” change managers will look to find a way to make the conflicting ideas of letting workers go and taking care of people compatible with one another. If this proves impossible, and the change cannot be prevented, then it may become necessary for the organization to modify its values in order to keep them in alignment with its behavior (Richard, Vera & Temi, 2015). Failing to do so may give the appearance of a lack of integrity.

Terms & Concepts

Buy-In: Often listed as a component vital to the success or failure of any kind of innovation, buy-in refers to the degree to which stakeholders—those who will be affected by the change—are committed to doing everything they can to further a successful outcome. Those who are so committed have “bought in” to the plan, similar to the way an investor buys shares in a company he or she believes will increase in value.

Change Agent: A change agent is a person that can be either inside an organization or outside of it. The role of the change agent is to champion change within the organization, informing others of the ways that change may benefit them and of the ways they can influence the forces of change in a productive direction.

Change Leadership: Though similar to change management, the concept of change leadership is distinct in the way that it focuses not only on coping with change but also steering the organization as a whole in a direction that will coincide with or even anticipate coming changes.

Kotter Eight-Step Process for Organizational Transformation: One of several popular frameworks for change management, intended to guide managers in learning how to effectively implement changes in their organizations. The emphasis in the Kotter framework is on strategically motivating employees.

Plan-Do-Check-Act Cycle: A four stage model of change management developed by W. Edwards Deming. While it was initially created for monitoring the product development process, its more general applicability was recognized almost immediately.

Stakeholder: Change management literature describes those who have an interest in the outcome of a change as stakeholders, similar to the concept of shareholders in a corporation.

Bibliography

Butler, L. (2016). Human resource management: Managing change. Teaching Business & Economics, 20(1), 8.

Cummings, S., Bridgman, T., & Brown, K. G. (2016). Unfreezing change as three steps: Rethinking Kurt Lewin’s legacy for change management. Human Relations, 69(1), 33–60. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=112017847&site=ehost-live

Dąbrowska, E., Sielska, J., & Zdanowska, J. (2014). Change management in health care—Overcoming mental and organisational barriers. Polish Nursing / Pielegniarstwo Polskie,54(4), 337–342.

Donnelly, P., & Kirk, P. (2015). Use the PDSA model for effective change management. Education for Primary Care: An Official Publication of the Association of Course Organisers, National Association of GP Tutors, World Organisation of Family Doctors, 26(4), 279–281.

Kumar, S., Kumar, N., Deshmukh, V., & Adhish, V. S. (2015). Change management skills. Indian Journal of Community Medicine, 40(2), 85–89.

Moghadam, S. K., Heydari, M., Heydari, G., & Jalalinasab, M. (2016). The organizational changes and the role of management accounting by looking at the environmental accounting and social accounting. International Journal of Scientific Management & Development, 4(9), 354–358. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=118456063&site=ehost-live

Parlakkilic, A. (2013). E-learning change management: Challenges and opportunities. Turkish Online Journal of Distance Education, 14(4), 54–68.

Percy, B. (2016). How automation ensures improvement: change management in quality management systems. Medical Product Outsourcing, (3), 28.

Rawlins, J. D. (2014). Mythologizing change: Examining rhetorical myth as a strategic change management discourse. Business And Professional Communication Quarterly, 77(4), 453–472.

Richard, B., Vera L., C., & Temi, D. (2015). An introduction to the 5M framework: Reframing change management education. BAR—Brazilian Administration Review, (1), 22.

Skalik, J. (2016). Strategic orientation in change management and using it when designing a company’s development. Management, 20(1), 197–210. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=116100798&site=ehost-live

Van Wyk, S. (2015). Change management: Making use of appreciative inquiry. Professional Nursing Today,19(4), 20–23.

Suggested Reading

Levasseur, R. E. (2013). People skills: Developing soft skills—A change management perspective. Interfaces, (6), 566. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=99553319&site=ehost-live

Park, K. O., & Koh, C. E. (2015). Effect of change management capability in real-time environment: An information orientation perspective in supply chain management. Behaviour & Information Technology, 34(1), 94-104. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=100071585&site=ehost-live

Simatupang, T., Govindaraju, R., & Amaranti, R. (2016). Change management perspectives in an ERP module implementation: A case study in a telecommunication company. Jurnal Teknik Industri, 18(1), 51–61.

Xerri, M. J., Nelson, S. A., Brunetto, Y., & Reid, S. M. (2015). NPM and change management in asset management organisations. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 28(4), 641–655. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=108528727&site=ehost-live