Organizational Change Management Undergoing Changes

Organizational Change Management

Undergoing changes within an organization is a critical, and thus very challenging, task that managers need to face and overcome to achieve the overarching goal of this necessary change. But before this goal could be achieved, managers are confronted with the reality that they have to create a balance between managing operations (daily tasks and processes in the organization) and human resources. Ultimately, in every organization, managers need to deal with human resource first in order to effectively implement changes in operations that management deems efficient for the organization.

This delicate balancing of human resource and operations management are reflected in the images of managing change, particularly the change manager as 'director' and 'navigator' (27). The relevance of these images are best mirrored in the Hewlett-Packard case study, wherein the case presented two types of management 'styles' as personified by Carly Fiorina and Mark Hurd, who assumed CEO positions in HP, consequently. Fiorina was depicted as projecting an image of the change navigator, as a response to the ongoing and eventual merger between HP and Compaq, giving focus on human resource management first to ensure that the merger will push through and be sustained over time without being detrimental to the company. As described, the image of the change manager as navigator is reflected of Fiorina because she focused on the people, because the success of the merger and the operations after the merger is dependent on whether or not personnel have "a history of distrust, hoarding of information, and boundary protection by functional units" (27). Hurd, meanwhile, is the change manager as director, since like Fiorina, he just responded to what he perceived was the company's direction after the merger, wherein he focused more on operations and implementing work efficiency to make the company profitable, than centering his attention to human resource. His success in using this strategy is reflected in the company's highest growth in seven (7) years; however, it is worth noting that Fiorina's and Hurd's efforts as CEOs to HP is complementary rather than contradictory to each other. Each CEO contributed to the company in his or her own way. Fiorina's strength was to make change acceptable through HR management, while Hurd considered change as a move towards efficiency rather than improving management-employee relations.