Change Management

Management's first responsibility to change is to identify processes or behaviors that are not proficient. Particularly, management must come up with new ideas that are more effective within an organization. Once changes are known, it is important for management to estimate the impact it will have on their organization and individual employees on many levels including technology, employee behavior, and work processes. At this point, management should assess the employee's reaction to an implemented change and try to understand the reaction to it. In many cases, change can be extremely beneficial but sometimes produces a tremendous amount of resistance.

For example, what a manager does and how it is done can be categorized by Henri Fayol's four functions of management to include: Planning, Organizing, Leadership, and Controlling. Through these functions management can be catalysts for change or by definition change agents. First, planning is a process that involves defining the organization's objectives or goals, establishing an overall strategy for achieving those goals, and developing a comprehensive hierarchy of plans to integrate and coordinate activities (Robbins et al., 2000, p. 247). One of the reasons for planning is to reduce the impact of change. It does this by creating an environment that is accepting of change and predicting change. For the most part, planning reduces uncertainty by forcing managers to look ahead, anticipate change, consider the impact of change, and to develop appropriate responses. Second, organizing is essentially a continuous incremental change program and seeks out problems, implements changes as they strive to improve their organization's efficiency and effectiveness. By comparing the definition of organizing to the definition change, it is safe to say that organizing is a function of management and a major contributor to the change. Third, leadership is the ability to influence a group towards the achievement of goals. It can also be used to reduce the resistance to change by altering people's attitudes, expectations, perceptions, and behavior through motivation, communication, participation, facilitation, negotiation, manipulation, and coercion (Robbins, et al., 2000 p. 248).

Fourth, control is the process of monitoring activities to ensure they are being accomplished as planned and of correcting any significant deviations. The control of the organization needs to flexible enough to absorb and to deal with change. For this reason, managers need to move away from bureaucratic style of control to encourage change (Graham, 2007). How do we put the functions of management and the possible changes of organizations into a process of change? In my opinion, the environment that we create through change is one that is conducive to stimulating innovation and change. An organization's culture can be a prevailing force for innovation