HR Management: Organizational Change
Why is organizational change so difficult? What is the role of the HR specialist in the change process?
There is no question that change is often difficult for organizations. As a matter of fact, change efforts are often times met with large-scale resistance from staff and employees, the reason being that humans are naturally resistant to change. This inclination to resist change stems from the idea that change brings about some kind of disruption in one's normal equilibrium and way of doing things, creating some form of uncertainty and a sense of insecurity. According to Harvey and Broyles (2010), humans survive largely by predicting their environments and adjusting themselves accordingly; change impedes on this predicting ability and creates a wave of uncertainty as to how exactly one ought to act to fit in the new environment. We can consider, for a moment, a scenario whereby a company is moving from a domestic to an overseas assignment -- employees are deemed to be resistant, particularly because of their inability to predict their new environment. This uncertainty would then spark a sense of insecurity, where employees think; will we still keep our jobs when the change is executed? Will the skills we currently possess be relevant to the new assignment? Will I still be relevant to the company? With this kind of insecurity, employees would often work towards...
Effective change management is in fact one of the key competencies of HR professionals. It has to do with the HR specialist acting as an agent of change and increasing their organization's capacity to handle the same through role influence; transformation, innovation and relationship influence; and meaningful problem-solving. An effective agent of change is able to identify and solve problems, formulate and implement goals, set leadership agenda, articulate a vision, and build relationships. They are in a position to not only overcome, but also manage internal resistance to change, and initiate flexibility that increases the overall organization's capacity to handle change.
Managing individual resistance to change basically involves helping employees prepare for, and adapt to change. In the scenario presented earlier, for instance, the HR professional could help employees prepare for change by offering training facilities to expand the employees' know-how and readiness to accommodate any new tasks or assignments likely to be necessitated by the change. In this particular case, training could…
