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Change Management, Processual, and Contingency Approaches

4 important questions on Change Management, Processual, and Contingency Approaches

Understand and identify the factors that can cause change to fail.

Making change fail is relatively easy. John Kotter identifies eight main failure factors:
Lack of urgency;
No supportive coalition;
No vision;
Poor communication;
Obstacles to change not removed;
No ''wins'' or achievements to celebrate;
Declaring victory too soon;
Not anchoring or embedding changes.

Lack of communication is a particularly significant cause of change failure.

Evaluate the advantages of stage models of change management.

Four stage models exist:
Unfreeze, move, refreeze;
The IHI large-scale change framework;
Kotter's eight stage model;
Nottingham Hospital's five step process.

These emphasize how change unfolds and develops over time, making changing demands on the change manager, and on those who are affected, at each stage. This rarely happens in practise. It encourages the change manger to anticipate and prepare for possible future problems.

Asses the theoretical and practical value of processual perspectives on change.

The outcomes of change are shaped by the combination and interaction of a number of factors over time in a given context. Factors: context, substance, implementation process and internal and external politics.

Strengths:
recognizes and emphasises the role of organizational politics. Advice to handel: plan, train, communicate, learn from mistakes and adapt to circumstances. It advocated to "be aware of this" instead of "do this".

Dangers:
Presenting change as overly complex and unmanageable, in placing focus on context at the expense of individual and team contributions, and in focus on awareness rather than clear direction.

Understand and apply contingency approaches to change management.

Contingency approaches argue that change implementation should take into account the attributes of the organisational context concerned.

It may seem obvious to argue that "the best approach" depends on the context. However, this idea of "fitting" change to the setting is easier to explain in theory than to put into practice.

The question on the page originate from the summary of the following study material:

Managing Organizational Change A Multiple Perspectives Approach | 9781259255113 | Ian Palmer, et al

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