How to overcome the barriers internal political management--留学生Essay代写范文

留学生Essay代写范文:“How to overcome the barriers internal political management”，这篇论文主要描述的是企业的变革必然会引发现有内部派系的利益争夺，固有利益所得的组织也会设置一些障碍来阻止企业的变革，如何才能够打破企业内部的政治斗成为了企业组织变革的主要障碍。

Ultimately, more than any other factor, the success of any Organisational change effort comes down to overcoming the barriers set up by ‘internal politics’ and warring organisational factions. Authors and consultants who ignore or neglect power struggles and politics in their techniques and methods of organisational change are, at best, na?ve; at worst, they are charlatans.”

Critically discuss this statement, drawing on established theory and illustrating your answer with the case studies that are discussed in the course (you must use these cases, and not others; reference to them is compulsory). To what extent are you persuaded by the argument in the statement?

引言---Introduction

The ability of organizations to engineer change as the need arises, to manage these changes once they are initiated and to ultimately survive the change process is becoming increasingly important due to the intensifying competition in business environment as well as the globalization of markets (Amagoh, 2008). This fact has made the study of change and development one of the great themes in the social sciences such that many of the social and natural science disciplines have developed theoretical literature and empirical findings on it.

This repertoire of research has generated a variety of theoretical perspectives on the nature of organizational change and development, in particular, the causes of change, the dynamics of the change process, as well as the factors that both hamper and/or favour successful organizational transformation. (Pettigrew, Woodman and Cameron, 2001; Weick and Quinn, 1999). This variety of perspectives no doubt, sometimes present a conflicting view about the causes of change in organizations. Despite this conflicts among theorists, however, a significant body of research have a consensus on several issues relating to organization change process (Fernandez and Rainey, 2006).

Despite the wealth of literature and empirical works on organizational changes and corporate transformation, numerous organizational restructuring or transformation effort often fail to achieve the intended goal. Dedicated research into why organizational change initiatives fails has produced a quite a lot of reasons one of which is resistance to change manifested in the form of subtle political behavior, internal politics and organization warring factions.

论据---Argument

Organizational change is a process that is typically met with disgruntled employees facing the changes. People resist change and behave accordingly. Change includes new adaptations to environmental circumstances and this leads to fear, frustration and other negative behavior that often thwart the change effort. Kurt Lewin (1952) presented a change theory that helps explain what goes on in the organization seeking to change. Human beings seek to create an environment that is safe and secure and change is a threat to this safe place. People need to be taught the new in a manner that deals with the stages that they are going to face as they change. People need to be motivated to change in order to unfreeze their current status. Once they accept the new they must again strive to set up their environment to be a safe and secure place which requires a new freezing at the new level.

So, basically, people resist change because it means a disturbance of the status quo, a threat to their vested interest in their jobs and an upset to their established ways of doing things. To tackle the management of change and its attending challenges, many authors have undertaken several researches to investigate the different facets and multi-dimensions of organizational change and change management. Several authors have come up with many other reasons for people’s resistance to change. Kotter and Schlesinger (1979), posits that people resist organizational change because of four reasons. One, parochial self interest (when employees’ focus is on individual best interest rather than corporate welfare, they put of resistance to change in form of political behavior or organizational factions). Two, misunderstanding and lack of trust. Three, difference in employee’s and management’s assessment of the change process and finally, low tolerance for change.

From Kotter and Schlesinger’s work, I can deduce that political warring and internal politics is one of the many ways people put up resistance to change and resistance to change is just one of the varied reasons why change efforts do not succeed; there have been several change initiatives that failed to produce desired result even in the face of the least resistance from employee (Kotter, 1995). Chaudron (2003) provides so many other reasons for failed organizational change efforts apart from internal politics. They include (1) Need-technique mismatch, (2) Failure to make systemic changes, (3) Over dependence on process teams and (4) failure to measure results to mention just a few. So Kotter and Schlesinger’s admittance of political behaviours as a possible deterrent to successful organizational transformation, does not provide an argument strong enough to conclude that internal politics and warring organizational factions is the major factor at the heart of unsuccessful organization change efforts.

Armenakis and Bedeian (1999) in “Organizational Change: A Review of Theory and research in the 1990s” also carried out a research to examine and review the theoretical and empirical organizational change literature available between 1990 and 1998. Due to the unwieldy volume of researches available within the period their review covers, they restricted their work to researches that focus on contextual issues that determine successful and/or unsuccessful change efforts and environmental (internal and external) conditions that impair or aid organizational changes. This I believe, helped them to highlight dominant perspectives and major findings in contemporary organizational change. In addition to this, they also reviewed empirical researches that focus on monitoring affective and behavioural reactions to change.

Armenakis and Bedeian specifically reviewed eight previous researches that investigated reasons for unsuccessful organization changes(Fox-wolfgramm, Boal and Hunt (1998); Sastry (1997); Gresov, Haveman and Oliva (1993); Haveman (1992); Huff, Huff and Thomas (1992); Kelly and Amburgey (1991); Damanpour (1991); Meyer, Brooks and Goes (1990)) and six empirical works that had examined affective and behavioural reactions to change (McHugh (1997); Wahlstedt and Edling (1997); Orlikowski (1996); Beer and Eisenstat (1996); Mossholder, Settoon, Harris and Armenakis (1995); Schweiger and DeNisi (1991)).

In all these researches, the overarching reasons put forth for failure of change attempts includes adoption of inappropriate strategic orientation method, lack of agreement or fit between content, context and process considerations in the change process, factors that underlie an organization’s long-term relationship to its external environment as well as conditions existing in an organization’s external and internal environments. These reason are consistent with both prevailing organizational change theories like systems theory and existing literature on organizational change dynamics such as Kotter (1990), Kotter and Schlesinger (1979).

In relation to behavioural reactions to change, Armenakis and Bedeian’s conclusion is that resistance to change is often manifested in reduced commitment, loss of job satisfaction and cynicism and less frequently, depression, anxiety and exhaustion. Interestingly, however, not one of these researches mentioned or alluded to power struggles and politics as a reason for unsuccessful organizational change neither was it identified as a factor at the heart of the success or otherwise of organizational changes in all the empirical works that Armenakis and his colleague reviewed.

Going further, Beer, Eisenstat and Spector (1990) in their article titled “Why Change programs don’t produce Change” argued that faced with changing markets and tougher competition, more and more companies initiates change to help them compete effectively. However, these changes do not produce the desired results because most change programs are guided by a theory of change that is fundamentally flawed. Changes are often initiated from the management level rather than at the grassroots because of the common belief that altering organizational structure and culture will effect changes in employee behaviour.

In essence, this means that those changes do not succeed because management alter the company’s structure and systems and expect employees’ behavior to change. The authors argue that change will not only happen, it will also be sustained when change efforts attempt to alter employees roles and responsibilities first. A sustained change in workers practices, attitudes and behavior will naturally happen when employees are thrust into new organizational context which imposes new roles, responsibilities and relationships on them and this will ultimately result in long-term alteration of corporate structure and culture. So Beer et al posits that organizational change will succeed if the approach to change is based on task alignment, starting at the periphery of the organization and moving steadily towards the corporate core.

Beer at al further highlighted six factors that enhances the success of the change process. They include (1) mobilizing commitment to change through joint diagnosis of business problem, (2) developing a shared vision on how to organize and manage for competitiveness, (3) fostering consensus for the new vision, competence to enact it and cohesion to move it along, (4) spreading change to all the department without pushing it from the top, (5) institutionalizing changes through formal policies, systems and structures, (6) monitoring and adjusting strategies in response to problems encountered in the change process. Considering these factors in order of gravity and importance, and in relation to the impact of politics and power struggles on successful organizational changes, only the third factor “ fostering consensus for the new vision, competence to enact it and cohesion to move it along” bears relevance because internal politics and warring organizational factions weaken or completely erodes the cohesion necessary for changes to be successful. However, this factor is by no means presented as the most important or even a highly fundamental factor necessary for the success of corporate change and transformation. This further goes to say that while the place of ‘internal politics’ and ‘ warring organizational factions’ in successful corporate changes should not be ignored, the factor is by no means the most crucial to successful organization changes.

Summarily, where internal politics surface in the course of effecting organizational changes, it could hinder or stagnate the change process if it is not effectively handled. Beer at al research point out that in the change process, internal politics may or may not be an issue to contend with, depending on the approach and principles used to initiate the change process. So, organizational politics and warring organizational factions is by no means the most important or most fundamental barrier to contend with in effecting corporate transformation or organizational changes.

Kotter (1995) in “Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail” also extensively studied why organizational change efforts fail to produce the desired results. He identified eight reasons why organized effort to change or transform either part of or the whole of established organizational structures and systems don’t succeed based on his observation of over a hundred companies that attempted to restructure or transform their operational process, organizational culture, management quality or total quality management.

Kotter investigated different types and categories of organizations in different geographic and economic locations as case studies so as to provide a valid basis for the generalization of his results. He identified eight reasons for unsuccessful change efforts. They are (1) Not establishing a great enough sense of urgency, (2) not creating a powerful enough guiding coalition, (3) lack of vision, (4), under communicating vision, (5) Not removing obstacles to vision, (6) Not systematically planning for and creating short – term wins, (7) declaring victory too soon and (8) not anchoring changes in the organization’s culture. My analysis of Kotter’s eight factors is that only the second and the fifth factors bear relevance to the issue of internal politics or political behavior because it is only in consideration of these two factors that people could put up resistance to the change effort. Just like in the other case studies, Kotter.

I would also like to point out that people could still resist change even when they intellectually understand the need for the change and they realize that the change is a good one and it will ultimately benefit them (Nadler and Tuchman, 1989). So this somewhat casts a doubt on Kotter and Schlesinger’s proposition that political behaviours that hinders organizational change arises only from people’s parochial self-interest. In order words, people could still resist change even when their self interest is protected. This therefore opens up the possibility that even in the absence of internal political and resistance to change in form of political behaviours, a change initiative could still prove abortive and futile if the change process is ineffectively initiated and if other factors such as those mentioned in Kotter (1995) and Beer et al (1990) are not properly considered and put in place.

Apart from Kotter and Schlesinger (), who alluded to the impact of politics and power toggles as barriers to successful organizational change, Axelrof, Axelrod, Jacobs and Beedom (:1) (though not part of the case studies, but worthy of mention all the same) also posits that “the underlying problems of all change efforts concern power – control and influence”. They argued that change and politics are inexorably linked and any serious attempt to cause change either in the form of new customer relation strategy, installing an enterprise wise information system, acquisition and adoption of new technology, mergers and acquisition, branding, entering new markets, organization design, or any other form of innovation must pay attention to the force of politics in the change process.

While I agree with this proposition, yet it does not necessarily mean that politics is the fundamental factor that hinders successful change process. Besides, Nadler and Truchman in their review provided evidence to show that effectively managing the political dynamics of change alone does not guarantee the success of the change process when other factors such as having a clear and strong vision for the change, generating enough energy to initiate and execute the change, effectively linking change to core strategic issues in the organization and identifying themes to communicate and conceptualize changes are not put in place. This goes to show that while of power and politics should not be neglected in the process of organizational change, yet it is by no means the most prominent barrier to success change process.

Nadler and Tuchman (1989) also investigated the principles for successful organizational change. They viewed an organizations as complex systems that, in the context of an environment and an available set of resources, produces output. They posit that there are two major elements essential in an organization. The first is strategy, the pattern of decisions that emerges over time about how resources will be deployed to produce output. The second is organization. organization includes four core components – work, people, formal structure and processes and informal structure and processes. they further argued that an organization needs to maintain a congruence among these elements to exist.

They went further to say that a major problem in organizational change is how to maintain a congruence in the system while implementing change. They highlighted three critical issues in managing change and they identified the political dynamics associated with change as one of the three critical factors. However, they emphasized that these factors areonly relevant in small scaled and less complex organizations. When changes involve large-scale and complex organizations, they argued that some other factors more serious than political dynamics come into play; large-scale changes poses additional issues to successful transition or changes because organizations become more difficult to change as they increase in complexity.

Finally, they stated that regardless of the complexity of an organization, factors that determine the success or otherwise of change initiatives includes having a clear and strong vision, generating enough energy to initiate and execute the change, effectively linking change to core strategic issues in the organization and identifying themes to communicate and conceptualize changes. The intrinsic idea in Nadler and Tuchman’s propositions is that where the factors itemized for successful change process are effectively put in place, organizational transformation efforts will still succeed even in the face of internal politics or political dynamics.

结论---Conclusion

In conclusion, while I agree that in a bid to resist change and to impede organizational restructuring or transformation, people sometimes put up political behaviours that could degenerate into internal politics and warring fractions which will ultimately serve as a barrier to the change process, this form of resistance to change is by no means a serious or pronounced reason for unsuccessful organizational transformation or change. With reference to Beer et al, (1990) and Kotter (1995), there are more fundamental reasons why change or organizational transformation do not succeed and employees sabotage organizational change efforts due to very different and sometimes more fundamental issues than the one put forward in the statement.

Apart from the reasons highlighted in Armenikas and Bedeian’s review, other prominent reasons researchers put forth for the failure of corporate change efforts are lack of vision, under-communicating the vision and/or non-removal of barriers to (Beer et al (1990); Kotter, (1995). Peter Drucker, (Kotter and Schlesinger, 1979) also argued that a major obstacle to successful organizational change is people’s inability to change their attitudes and behaviours.

Therefore, to a large extent, I disagree with the argument in the statement. In as much as I agree that internal politicking could hinder successful organizational change, I believe that there are so many other reasons, much more fundamental and more important than ‘internal politics’ and ‘warring factions’ that accounts for unsuccessful organizational change or transformation.

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