Drivers for Organizational Change Are Codified Into

Drivers for organizational change are codified into internal or external factors. Each of these stratifications has a different set of features -- significantly, these features appear to be antipodes of one another. However, these features largely provide the setting for the context of the actual change that takes place within an organization, since these features indicate specific problems that change addresses.

Internal drivers for change within organizations pertain to factors that are representative of various aspects of organizations. The unifying feature of all internal drivers is that they represent inefficiencies, which in some cases are outright deficiencies. Very rarely does an organization induce change because it is doing something right; most internal changes are related to aspects of an organization that require improvement. A look at some of the internal factors for change for the United Kingdom's Corus Strip Products confirms these facts. There was a point after the company's 1999 founding in which its service was characterized by tardy delivery of the steel it manufactured. Also, there was low staff morale during this same time period, which resulted in decreased production and organizational output (No author 2012). Both of these internal factors were inefficiencies within this organization and areas for improvement.

The predominant feature of external drivers of change is that they are usually determined by the marketplace (Mathes, Brueck, Luck 2001). While the inefficiencies of internal drivers are things that a company is doing wrong, the marketplace concerns of external factors typically indicates that an organization is not doing something that other organizations are. For instance, in the case of Corus, other steel manufacturers in the international market were producing this product less expensively than Corus was. As a result, the demand for Corus's product declined. Another marketplace factor that functioned as an external driver for change was the fact that "the fall in demand for steel for the automotive industry meant that Corus needed to find different types of customers or develop different products" (No author 2012). Thus, developments within the marketplace for steel served as external factors for Corus, in much the same way that marketplace developments in general will characterize external factors for any organization.

The specifics of the key features of internal and external drivers for change provide the context that organizational change will inevitably take. Corus was able to address many of its internal inefficiencies with a dedicated series of internal reforms that it dubbed The Journey. One of the chief components of this two-year, organizational transformation was the dissemination of a booklet to all employees detailing the company's new values and employee requirements (No author, 2012). Those that were unable to or unwilling to conform were let go, and many of this organization's problems that served as drivers for change resulted in "corrective action" (Green 2012).