Theories of Organizational Change

Organizational Change

There are many organizations that use strategic planning to implement change in their services so that the facility runs in a more effective manner. Thus, the overall responsibility of healthcare providers is to offer the best level of care to their patients. For those organizations that follow the plan process, they have had solid outcomes with staff and patient feedback. During my period of research, I generally noticed that many healthcare providers shared the same mission, which was to serve patients with the highest quality care through performance measurements and improvement processes. The ways in which the effectiveness of organizational change will be determined once implemented is through a strong and thorough understanding of roles and positions. This can be achieved through deadlines and guidelines being set so that the protocol is followed in all aspects through measurement. Measurement offer the ability to gather quantitative values to subjective experience, thus enabling quality improvement in the desire to better the quality informed via performance measurement. The two truly are dependent on one another as dictated by the National Quality Center. Performance Measurement focuses more on the way the organization mechanizes within the organization. The Quality improvement gathers information from patients, employees, and the government on what suggestions or changes that should be made and is able to provide cohesive responses based on those ideas.

My research has demonstrated that certain factors can make it more or less likely that an organizational change will or will not be accepted. One finding that was discovered was the trend of structural closure: "...low levels of structural closure (i.e., structural holes) in a change agent's network aid the initiation and adoption of changes that diverge from the institutional status quo, but hinder the adoption of less divergent changes" (Battiliana & Casciaro, 2012). What these findings also remind one is to never underestimate the power and prestige of social influence and how it can motivate or undermine change. In order for any organizational change to be effective, one must also recognize that there will likely be some resistance to the organizational change: this resistance needs to be anticipated and a planned response needs to be developed. Generally there have been "two dominant yet contrasting approaches: the demonizing versus the celebrating of resistance to change... both of these approaches fail to address power relations adequately and, in so doing, raise practical, ethical and theoretical problems in understanding and managing change..." (Thomas & Hardy, 2011). Truly, the most effective means of organizational change occurs from a more alternative, critical approach, demonstrating how both power and resistance help to engage in organizational change: the key also revolves around an organization's ability to pinpoint all power-resistant relations and to attempt to thwart them (Thomas & Hardy).

If organizational change has any hope in being successful, this is largely going to depend on an organization's ability to mitigate their explicit reactions to change, along with their employee's explicit reactions to change, as they are largely conceptualized as tridimensional attitudes (Oreg, 2013). Furthermore, the leaders of the change process need to be more ready and available to accept certain change antecedents and consequences while proposing directions for future adaptation. Above all else, it appears as though leaders need to be willing and able to adapt the change process based on the success, failures or problems of all those employees involved. Finally, it's also important to bear in mind that the researcher also has an extreme responsibility to present all findings with accuracy and not to pursue ambiguity, which sometimes means presenting the less comfortable discoveries and implications for research (Buchanon, 2013).