¶ … organizational change evolve in the next twenty years and what are the implications for managers?
According to the consultant Robert Rouda, over the past twenty years organizational changes have been seismic, spanning virtually every conceivable industry. Changes in organizational and economic structure have meant that managers must change their philosophical approaches towards the persons they oversee. Today's organization is now viewed as a sprawling, international and interconnected system, rather than an internally contained entity. Variations in standard operating procedures no longer impact merely the immediate daily organizational environment, rather they have reverberations around the world, in every company branch. A company's adoption of a new form of word processing software in India will affect the reception of data in that company's American branch, and slowdowns in one area of the supply chain can cause an entire corporate backlog. Organizational change has begun to assume much faster pace than before, moving from a slow, drip-by-drip process. There is a greater need to move more quickly with consumer and supplier desires, and to keep apace with technology. (Rouda, 1995)
However, as change grows swifter, certain elements of human nature remain the same, and change resistance remains an inevitable fact of life. Managers must cope with this on a daily basis. Personnel must be trained in new technology, and managers must help employees psychologically cope with higher rates of personnel turnover as the company merges, expands, downsides, and expands again. There is thus greater likelihood of resistance to changes in organizational culture, because of the swifter rate of technological advances, the increased influence of globalization, and the ever-fluctuating size and composition of many multinational companies. Regular training initiatives in cultural sensitivity, encouraging and perhaps funding employee's further schooling, and regularly striving to reevaluate company vision and mission to create a cohesive organizational climate in an increasingly fragmented would are all policies that managers must strive to pursue to greater effect over the course of the next twenty years. Managers must grow more technologically astute and aware of the human cost of technological and economic change, yet they must also grow more sensitive to individual differences of personality and culture.
Works Cited
Rouda, Robert. (1995). "Background and Theory for Large Scale Organizational Change
Methods." Internship Project on Large Scale Organizational Change Methods.
Last updated 1996. Retrieved 7 Sept 2006 at http://alumnus.caltech.edu/~rouda/background.html
