Colorado Technical University Online Managing Organizational Change Discussion
Leroy Banks is the Director of Change Management for Red Carpet, a national hospitality and entertainment company. He has contracted you to be an OD Consultant because Red Carpet has recently acquired a movie theater company and needs to manage the change process. External forces for change are those that come from an organization’s outside environment. Internal forces for change are those that arise from employees within the organization. Leroy has asked you to begin by assessing forces for change.
Review the Red Carpet scenario for this course and with your classmates; discuss the following:
Identify and describe an example of an external force for change.
Identify and describe an example of an internal force for change.
In your opinion, what are the biggest challenges of being in the role of an OD Consultant at Red Carpet?
2- Responses to Other Students: Respond to at least 2 of your fellow classmates with at least a 100-word reply about their Primary Task Response regarding items you found to be compelling and enlightening. To help you with your discussion, please consider the following questions:
What did you learn from your classmate's posting?
What additional questions do you have after reading the posting?
What clarification do you need regarding the posting?
What differences or similarities do you see between your posting and other classmates' postings?
1- Darrell Cavalier
Professor Wheeler HRMT440
Recognizing the Need for Change
(Organizational External Drivers of Change) External forces for change come from outside of a company they are more challenging because a company can have little or no control. Some examples of external forces for change are competitive, customer, stakeholder, and market changes, technological developments, economic, demographic attributes, government, and regulation action. In the Red-Carpet scenario an external force for change would be market change. The company has purchased a movie theater business, which means the company has to find ways to gain a competitive advantage to get ahead of the market by finding out what kind of movies people like, and finding ways to provide a comfortable environment for customers and then implementing the changes needed to outperform the competition.
(Organizational Change) Internal forces for change come from within an organization, unlike external drivers, internal forces give management more control. The need for training and education would be an internal force for change in this scenario, employees would have to have training on the best ways to manage a movie theater to keep up with the external changes. An external factor that would already have an advantage is competition, simply because the competition has been trained and educated. Whereas the Red-Carpet team will now have to find ways to train employees to go above and beyond for customers, and with that comes greater job expectations.
There are many challenges to being an OD consultant, I believe the resistance to change part will be the biggest challenge for Red-Carpet. “Resistance to change is the action taken by individuals and groups when they perceive that a change that is occurring as a threat to them (Simpson, 2020). Resistance is likely in most cases of change; an OD consultant must realize that with change comes uncertainty and anxiety but the skill to mutually overcome that resistance will represent a company reputation. Communication is vital to ease fears that may come with change, while also reassuring reluctant employees to adopt changes with trust.
References
Simpson, B. (2020). Changing Minds. Retrieved from Resistance to Change: http://changingminds.org/disciplines/change_manage...
2- Michelle Mitchem
Recognizing the need for change
Many external changes bombard modern organizations and make change inevitable. The general environment has social, economic, legal, and political and technological dimensions. Any of these can introduce the need for change. In recent years, far-reaching forces for change have included developments in information technology, the globalization of competition, and demands that organizations take greater responsibility for their impact on the environment. In a movie theater company the team approach adopted by many organizations leads to flatter structures, decentralized decision making, and more open communication between leaders and team members.
Besides reacting to or anticipating changes on the outside, an organization may change because someone on the inside thinks a new way of doing things will be beneficial or even necessary. Pressures for change that originate inside the organization are generally recognizable in the form of signals indicating that something needs to be altered. As far as the movie theater and its employees you'll be able to start a new process and make sure everything is flowing smoothly with this change. For example:
Employees' desire to share in decision-making.
Employees' demand for effective organizational mechanisms.
Higher employees’ expectations for satisfying jobs and work environment.
Employees' desire for higher wage payment.
A company that hires a group of young newcomers may be met with a set of expectations very different from those expressed by older workers. Although organizational changes are important, managers should try to institute changes only when they make strategic sense. A major change or two every year can be overwhelming to employees and create confusion about priorities. A logical conclusion is that managers should evaluate internal forces for change with as much care as they evaluate external forces.
I feel like the biggest challenges for this will be ownership change and the local competition. Competition from a new company with a different way of winning customers. If a business wants to stay competitive, it will need to fight back by changing the way it operates or changing what it offers to customers. While engaging in competition is usually an inherent part of doing business, that competition may be especially threatening if it comes from an adversary which has some advantage that the organization was not prepared for.
Often that new owner will want to use a new ways of running the organization that has worked for it in other businesses. The new owner may be planning to cut inefficiencies by reducing the workforce, use a different inventory management method, or have a management philosophy that will require big changes in the organization. It can be over come.