Internal forces for change come from inside the organization. This may come from both human resource problems and managerial behavior.
Human Resource Problems
These problems stem from employee perceptions about their work environment and conflict between an employee and organization needs. Organizations might respond to these problems by using the various approaches to job design by implementing realistic job previews and by reducing employees’ role conflict, stress, work overload and ambiguity.
Managerial Behavior
Excessive interpersonal conflict between managers and their subordinates is a sign of implementing an immediate change. Inappropriate leader behavior such as inadequate direction and support are the cause of conflict between managers and their subordinates.
Nature of Change
Organizations introduce changes through people. Unless the people arc willing to accept the need and responsibility for organizational change, intended changes can never be translated into reality. In addition, individuals have to learn to adapt their attitudes and behavioral patterns to constantly changing environments.
Management of change involves both individual and organizational change. Individual change is behavioral change, which is determined by individual characteristics of members such as their knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, needs, expectations and skills. It is possible to bring about a total change m_ an organization by changing behaviors of individual members through participative and. educative strategies. Although, the degree of difficulty involved in the change and the time taken to bring about the change will depend on the target of change.
The attitudes towards change are largely dependent on the nature of the situation and the manner in .which changes are initiated and executed.
Changing individual behavior is more time consuming and a difficult task. The linkage between attitude and behavior is not direct and therefore changing behavior is more difficult than changing attitudes. One’s attitude does not necessarily get reflected in one’s behavior. For example, we know that honesty is the best policy and we have favourable altitudes towards people- who are honest but in certain situations, we may still act in a less honest way.
Changing group behavior is usually a more prolonged and harder task. Every group has its own dynamics of push and pull that attempt to neutralise the change that may have taken place in an individual. Due to this group dynamics, individual member’s ‘changed behavior’ may revert to earlier normative behavior in order to maintain the change in the existing conditions. However, due to the same reasons of a group’s over-riding influence on individual members, sometimes it may be easier to tackle the group as a whole rather than trying to change the behavior of members one by one.
Bringing total behavioral change in all the groups and members of an organization involves difficult long-range effort. More often than not, it is a slow painful process to usher a total cultural change in an organization.
It is possible to change total organization without focusing at the level of individual’s change of knowledge, attitude and behavior. Modification in the organization’s structures, policies, procedures and techniques leads to total organizational change. These types of changes alter prescribed relationships and roles assigned to members and eventually modify the individual members’ behavior and attitudes. As these two kinds of changes are interdependent, the complexity of managing change increases manifold.
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