Organizational Decline and Growth
Organizations decline when they do not embrace change in their environment. Adapting to change enables organizations to maintain competitiveness and relevance in the market. Managers must take a proactive stance by actively monitoring their environment for change forces. This enables them to understand them and enact relevant policies to guide their organizations. Organizations that successfully adapt to change survive and grow in their respective markets.
Analysis of the environment identifies the internal strengths and weaknesses of a firm. It also shows external threats and opportunities for growth. This knowledge should be used make regulations that drive growth and manage change in the firm. Managers can also use change agents to help firms grow even during crises caused by change forces. Change agents are employees that communicate the benefits of and reasons behind management policies to colleagues. Change agents can also be professional consultants who understand the changing environment better than the firm’s managers do. They also have the ability to assess the firm objectively and advice on how to improve it (Harsh, 2010).
Alternative measures management can use to stimulate growth include encouraging innovation and knowledge sharing in the firm’s culture. The presence of decisive leadership may also spur growth by providing vision to the organization. Employees should be included in formulating change policies. Empowering them to make decisions may produce ideas to give the firm competitive advantage. It motivates employees at all levels to take responsibility for the firm’s growth and survival. This is also called growth via collaboration.
Forces For and Against Organizational Change
Organizational change is the movement of firms from their current state to a progressive state, to increase their efficiency (Jones, 2010). The process of change in an organization is complex and is characterized by different forces working for and against change. Forces inducing change are usually in an organization’s external environment. As a result, managers have little influence over them. In contrast, forces resisting change are usually internal.
One of the major forces of change is Ethical. American organizations today have to deal with an increasing consciousness regarding ethics due to the surge in white-collar crime. Ethical issues like dishonest accounting practices and sweatshop goods can cause firms to lose market share. Other firms like American Apparel have leveraged on ethics to grow. Competitive forces also induce change. As firms fight to gain advantage over their competitors, they constantly come up with better goods and services. Other firms must keep up to remain relevant. Social forces like diversity in the workplace and an increasingly technology savvy society catalyze change by requiring firms to adapt new policies. Managers have had to learn to motivate diverse workers and train them to keep up with technological changes.
Economic forces such as financial crises necessitate firms to be more efficient. Globalization is another important factor in the organizational environment. Calls for fair trade and opening up markets have changed how the American agricultural industry operates. Globalization is closely related to politics. Political and legal factors determine the level of influence of globalization. Politicians make decisions concerning opening up domestic markets to imports. Businesses also operate in highly regulated environments. Laws such as those governing human resource operations influence company policies.
Resistance to change can be at an organizational, functional, group, or personal level. Hindrances at the organizational and functional level include inflexible structures, which cannot embrace change quickly. Power struggles between top-level managers compromise with the ability to adapt to change by causing confusion to junior employees. The overall organizational culture influences the ability to deal with change. A unifying culture enables all organizational units to work towards one goal hence avoiding the waste caused by fragmentation. The fragmentations can be caused by different divisional orientations. On the group and personal level, inertia to change resulting from personal attitudes can result in employees sabotaging the change processes. This is especially the case when the reason behind the change is not understood. The disruption of group norms in the change processes changes individual role. This causes confusion and impedes change in the group.
References
Harsh, P. (2010). Organizational change. India: Pearson Education.
Jones, G. R. (2010). Organizational theory, design, and change. Upper Saddle River, N. J: Prentice Hall.
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