Organisational Change

Universities play a central role in addressing key challenges of social, economic and environmental sustainability. For this role to be delivered effectively it is critical to identify not only what strategies are most productive but also how to ensure they are successfully led and implemented. This project seeks to apply the proven change leadership framework developed in the ALTC's 'Learning Leaders in Times of Change' project to the distinctive area of effective turnaround leadership for sustainability in higher education. The project is being undertaken in a collaboration between the University of Western Sydney, the Australian National University, the Sustainable Futures Academy and the University of Gloucestershire. It will produce a validated change leadership framework for building Education for Sustainability (EfS) successfully into the core activities of our universities, as well as a package of leadership development resources for use in individual recruitment, promotion, development and performance management activities. It will also document a range of successful practice models.

This work is focussed on the deployment of innovation in an educational charity to ensure its survival and re-growth a challenging climate. By the nature of its specialisation, the management of knowledge, learning and innovation are implicit in the operations of this charity and could be assumed to be required core competencies of this type of charity. Innovation is here broadly defined to encompass a range of new products or services, process technologies or programs pertaining to organisation members.
This charity has recently found itself in challenging times and its survival is under threat. If it is to survive into the future, it must find a way to innovatively deliver both its services and fundraising efforts. Innovation in operations and delivery is needed as a strategic tool in the design and emergence of a revitalised organisation. This work recommends processes and actions the charity must adopt to achieve this aim.

THE INDUSTRIAL EVOLUTION OF HEALTHCARE
It is a transformative fact today that most countries and
their citizens draw on essential medicines and vaccines
designed and manufactured and then traded across hundreds
and often, thousands of miles. Health technologies
include both mature and innovative products, in
some cases, entirely disrupting patient experiences, the
medical profession, and the organization of industries.
Several sub-sectors such as medicines, vaccines, diagnostic
kits, medical devices, and surgical instruments
are produced and governed within and across national
boundaries. These technologies may be regulated for a
range of health and safety reasons, and often through
industrial policies. New economics for health focused
on technological change and the evolutionary aspects
of industrial organization in the health industry may
therefore look different from health economics as we
know it today.

In this study, we examined the implementation of an electronic health records (EHR) system in a small family practice clinic. We used three data collection instruments to evaluate user experience, work pattern changes, and organisational changes related to the implementation and use of the EHR system: (1) an EHR user survey, (2) interviews with key personnel involved in the EHR implementation project, and (3) a work analysis of clinic staff. A longitudinal design with two data-collection rounds was employed: data were collected prior to EHR implementation and after EHR implementation. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected and analysed. Employees of the small clinic perceived few changes in their work after the implementation of the EHR system, except for increased dependency on computers and a small increase in perceived workload. The work analysis showed a dramatic increase in the amount of time spent on computers by the various job categories. The EHR implementatio...

In the lead up to large-scale change bought about by enterprise system implementations, there are multiple complex influences at play that impact perceptions that the organisation might not be ready for the change effort. These influences manifest in uncertainty, ambiguity in roles and responsibilities and in many cases, information overload. Organisational change management (OCM) is often considered to be one of the most important success factors for enterprise system implementations and has even be referred to as a critical success factor. In this paper a definition of OCM will be proposed and outcomes of an investigation into the effectiveness of integrating OCM when implementing enterprise resource planning projects will be discussed. For the purposes of this investigation large scale enterprise resource planning systems were chosen as the software of choice to study. These systems by virtue of their complexity and implementation costs often cause long reaching impacts on the organization. Often to the point where organizations can wait for long periods of time to obtain any real benefit realisation. In this study 208 European organisations responded to a survey. Findings in brief indicated that experts who applied CM in their projects evaluated their projects as more successful than projects without CM.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of preferences when SMEs are confronted with the practical problems associated with implementing frequent and large scale changes to their working policies and practices. This paper aims to alleviate some of the concerns as claimed in positioning and change agency theory by introducing ‘preferential role positioning’ to organizational change.

Design/Methodology/approach – This study uses a qualitative case study approach and change agency and positioning theories to find out the extent to which staff and management experienced the practical difficulties and challenges and what resolution actions they took. Eighty-five semi-structured interviews were conducted in 2004/05 and 2011 with the staff and management of four SMEs in the UK. An interpretative analysis was conducted on the case data in the tradition of Husserl and Schutz. In the first set, participants were asked to elucidate the difficulties faced in their roles and how these were experienced whilst the second focused on impacts and strategies. Three independent researchers reviewed and interpreted the qualitative data and helped with the coding and thematisation.

Findings – This paper's main results are based on the data's three stages showing how SME members chose to deal with the practical difficulties namely ‘new structures and procedures’ (stage 1); ‘new ways of communicating’ (stage 2) and ‘new collaborations’ (stage 3). The combination of the stages’ aspects led to the emergence of ‘preferential role positioning’ as the study’s theoretical contribution to the gap on preferences in organizational change research.

Research limitations – The eighty-five interviews from UK-based SMEs constrained the sample size thereby limiting the number of questionnaire categories asked. The findings and their analysis cannot be generalised to non SMEs that seek to address similar difficulties.

Practical implications – Managers need to be aware of the adverse impacts of using draconian, top down disciplinary and punishment measures/structures as a way to implement change. Other practical lessons include the fact that managers should contextualise people’s anxieties, dissatisfaction, resistance and disengagement as a platform from which social knowledge can be generated with all change agents in order to resolve implementation challenges in the longer term. Staff developed the ability to deal with some practical issues such as navigating through the new departmental structures, new working procedures and new ways of talking with management and with each other to implement change more successfully.

Social implications - The social value of the findings demonstrate that preferences can be imported from other social science disciplines into Organizational Studies to show the value of what people can contribute and how they choose to do so (i.e. via what discourse, using what types of interactions and capabilities to do so). In addition, the results show that management need to consider employees in their plans as they try to implement change firstly to facilitate greater interaction and success, secondly to minimise implementation difficulties and thirdly as a recognition that there are multiple change agents and multiple role-enacting positions in developing sociological knowledge that can be of value.

Originality/value – This study’s three-stage approach has shown that a successful implementation and management of change in SMEs should also include a bottom-up recognition of the difficulties, adversities, conflicts and tensions and a resolution to deal with the structural and communicative constraints via dialogue and ‘preferential role positioning’.

Keywords: staff, management, preferences, SMEs, organizational change

One of the dilemmas faced by directors and other corporate leaders is the need to be entrepreneurial in ensuring the future success of a company which involves risk, while at the same time retaining prudent control. Transitioning leadership suggests a process of adjustment, adaptation, transformation or metamorphosis from one condition, situation or state to another, depending upon the extent of the internal or external change required to continue to operate and cope. The process also involves risk and its management. Boards need to ensure that risk aversion and contemporary approaches to compliance and risk management do not stifle creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship. In many contexts, approaches to risk management and the risk management community may need to change if risk management is to be viewed more positively as an enabler of enterprise, transition, change and transformation rather than as an inhibitor and overhead cost.

Published as:

Coulson-Thomas, Colin (2017), Transitioning Leadership and Risk Management, Effective Executive, Vol. XX No. 4, December, pp 19-30

Executive coaching is now seen in many organisations, both private and public, as an essential professional development intervention.  While in the recent past, coaches may have been engaged by individual senior managers, it is increasingly the case that they are used throughout the management structure of organisations.  As a result, many organisations have had to engage the services of teams or ‘faculties’ of coaches, either recruited individually, engaged ‘en mass’ from coaching or management consultancy organisations, or developed internally.  This raises a number of questions, not least of which are:
• Should an organisation use internal or external coaches?
• How should these coaches be recruited and selected?
• How should coaches and coachees be match?
• How should the coaching faculty be managed?
This chapter will offer a tentative model for answering these questions, based partly on the author’s personal experience of being recruited into a corporate coaching faculty, partly on recruiting a coaching faculty for a government-sponsored initiative, and, in part, on recent research findings.

Med denne artikkelen ønsker vi å vise at man ikke behøver å forstå teori og praksis som to ulike verdener. Vi argumenterer for at forskningsbasert teori må omformes til handlingsteori hvis den skal få betydning  for skolens praksis, og vi argumenterer for at dette krever teoretisering, som vi definerer som "informert refleksjon" der både forskningsbasert og praksisbasert teori trekkes inn.  Ved hjelp av to case; de nasjonale satsingene Ny Giv og Skolebasert kompetanseutvikling, illustrerer vi hva dette kan innebære.  Vårt håp er at vi kan bidra til å utvikle teori som kan brukes av kurstilbydere, lærere, skoleledere, planleggere og skoleeiere når de skal utvikle en bedre skole basert på kurs eller annen form for kompetanseutvikling.
(NB: Det er ikke sikkert artikkelen vises som tekst, men den kan lievel lastes ned.)

Since a group of McKinsey consultants coined the phrase the War for Talent in 1997 (Michaels, Handfield-Jones, & Axelrod, 2001; Axelrod, Handfield-Jones, & Michaels, 2002), the topic of talent management has received a remarkable degree of practitioner and academic interest. In our developing world the organizations have to choose their personnel under different complicated and changing environment. This makes the managers obligate with the importance of choosing right personnel according to the different situations. Becoming one of the important topics of HRM, talents effect directly the organization and the organization success. Nevertheless, competitions of organizations become the competition of talents. Talent management (or succession management) is the on-going process of analysing, developing and effectively utilizing talent to meet business needs. It involves a specific process that compares current talent in a department to the strategic business needs of that department. Results lead to the development and implementation of corresponding strategies to address any talent gaps or surpluses. Talent management have becoming need of an hour because business have become more complex and dynamic, positive relation between better talent and better performance, employees expectations are also changing, to save on wastage of funds due to employee absenteeism and turnover etc. In an interview Lenovo India's MD Amar Babu, his focus is on talent: coaching, team-building and making the right pitch for the right people and said. "Talent management today tops my agenda and role," he says. People and teams, he knows, are what go into making a successful organization. "Especially at the middle and senior management levels, it is becoming increasingly difficult to get good talent which matches the company's culture [1]

In recent management and organisational studies, researchers have explored the tensions emerging between social constructions of femininity and the identity of the ‘modern’ working woman. The fundamental insight is that the practices, beliefs, and narratives that define women and men are socially constructed and historically situated in power relations. In exploring an organisation’s culture, focusing on the narratives of femininity, i.e. the stories that shape the identities of individuals and groups, serves as a tool to better understand these constructions.

This book explores the impact on business leadership by the changes in the new world of work and the implications of the new sciences on the way in which social systems adapt and the rising levels of awareness. Adaptive intelligence in individuals, groups, societies and organisations becomes increasingly important.

Through the optimalisation of individual functioning, leadership capacity can be built, and ultimately business decision-making can be optimised. Focused organisational development interventions can contribute significantly to the enhancement of individual dynamics, the increase of functionality in teams and the rewiring of organisational strategies, structures and practices to ensure congruence between what is happening inside the organisation and outside the system. An in-depth understanding of the social containing system in which the organisation operates, will ensure relevant and appropriate reactions to external impact.

The doing (strategy) and the being (values) should be translated in such a way that human energy in the system to perform is wired around these aspects. The knowing (consciousness) of the impact of self on others enhances sustainability. It is the task of organisational development practitioners in the new world of work to enable systems to unleash this human energy for organisational benefits.

Africa is a country of many peoples. The diversity dynamics introduced by various diversity factors such as tribes, nationalities, gender, age and other aspects of diversity of thoughts such as personality type, intelligence and world view result in a complex, self-adapting environment. The promise that underpins the valuing of diversity may perhaps manifest in new social, economical and political models for the future.

Inside organisations organisational development practitioners play an important role as a strategic partner, enabler, inspirational leader, thought leader and group process facilitator. The way in which the organisational development practitioner co-constructs organisational strategy, architecture and culture is reliant on the systemic interplay with other strategic functions such as learning and development, communication and human resources.

Efficient organisational development practices can revitalise relationships within the workplace, communities and ecologies.  This book aims at providing a solid theoretical and empirical grounding from an organisational developmental stance and perspectives to the field of workplace spirituality. Organisational development methodologies that can result in Inclusivity from across various disciplinary worlds evoke a view of the potential for a more humanistic and ecological view of life in organisations.

The book is designed to capture leading-edge thinking about organisational development in organisations as it merges with traditional African wisdom.  Currently, organisational development practices differ from company to company and from practitioner to practitioner. It manifests in ways that range from organisational effectiveness efforts to a highly individualised craft of catalyst practitioner. In an attempt to provide a solid conceptualisation of the field of study and a framework of inclusivity that can be followed by means of case studies and organisational development methodologies this book strives to combine some of the practices into an inclusive ontology.

This paper reports a case study of implementing activity-based costing (ABC) in a Portuguese telecommunications firm. It proved problematic. Production engineers were reluctant to use ABC, being skeptical about its accuracy and usefulness. Workers resisted ABC by inputting inaccurate data late. Production managers tolerated this. Production personnel had difficulty understanding ABC, relating it to their jobs, and feared it would add to work intensification and redundancies. In contrast, commercial managers, responsible for pricing and investment, and senior managers were satisfied with ABC. They believed it was more accurate than previous systems, met the requirements of regulators and financial markets, and eased consolidation of accounts. They used ABC data for decisions despite its problems. The results were consistent with factor and process-based research on ABC implementation. For example, top management support and generous resources help explain why the project was evaluated favourably outside of production. User involvement and ownership of the project was high but the prioritisation of commercial over production needs, and education and training delays fuelled conflicts between commercial and production managers. Given inter-professional rivalries and production managers' token commitment to implementing ABC it is questionable whether ABC could ever have been effective within production. The case confirms that evaluations of

Since the 1990s, change management has received considerable attention as the new paradigm for the management of organisational transformations as well as behavioural and motivational changes within both for-profit and non-profit organisations. As a result, change management has been included in most bachelor's and master's degree programmes in social work and ped-agogics in Germany, either as additional courses or as an area of specialisa-tion. However, its interdisciplinary and intersectional nature has, so far, not been thoroughly considered in the development of managerial and social competences. In particular, the relationship between management science and professional practice was not given much attention, even though the development of change strategies in Human Service Organisations (HSO) must be based on research findings from both social sciences and management studies. In addition, management research and education need to draw conclusions from experiences gained in professional practice (e.g. Raelin, 1997). Research on the theory of transfer in the field of change management has not kept pace with the practice of leading change. So far, existing research has failed to develop a satisfactory concept of theory-practice transfer and ignored the relationship of the justification and development of change strategies as part of the management of social organisations. A number of important questions for researchers, educators, practitioners, consultants, etc. are

In this special issue of the European Journal of Higher Education, a number of experienced scholars provide a broad picture of the most recent round of mergers involving higher education institutions in Europe and beyond. In doing so, they address issues pertaining to the different phases described above and from various theoretical perspectives and in the light of particular historical trajectories and institutional conditions. The primary aim is to provide both an empirical account of recent developments as well as an initial foundation for more sophisticated and robust conceptual models used to illuminate on the complex phenomenon surrounding mergers in higher education, and, in turn, critically assess the implications when it comes to change patterns and future directions at the national and supranational (Europe) levels

Abstract: The argument I will develop in this essay is that the foreign students are a latent human resource who can assist with overcoming English monolingualism in the Australian population. Foreign students, properly rewarded, can be a major source of skills transfer. Every one of those students is a walking compendium of language and cultural skills that Australians need to know.

Do you want to become a Super Navigator? Life Navigation is four concrete tools about time, goals, energy and spaces – each of which can provide a significant boost to your productivity and life quality.

In a knowledge society it’s not about how many hours you are working. It is about working when you are most productive. Life Navigation is creating a flexible work culture and first step in the cultural change is to set people free from 9-5 and that work is something that only can take place at the office. Work is not a place – it’s an ongoing activity. Second, focus more on results and less on visibility. Third, give people the tools to improve their individual Work-Life Balance.

This paper suggests that Chandler's (Chandler, AD, 1990. Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism. Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, MA.) organisational capabilities framework can be modified to explain how suppliers of complex product ...

I was reading a paper from Gartner the other day about 2021 strategic technological trends, and when compared with the 2020 revision, I saw how powerful these two new themes are today: location independence and business resilient delivery. I was pleased to see that (eventually), these principles are now recognised as a priority; but sadly and quite frankly - did we have to experience a pandemic to figure this out?