Managerial Perception towards Organizational Change

Abstract

ABSTRACT Change is a part of continuous existence for organizations globally. Although the sources for change drivers for firms may vary, but how the decision makers perceive such change drivers would possibly have a deeper meaning in the ways that an organization reacts to such changes. Managing organizational change has been a focus for academic research since many decades now. However, there has been a dearth of any in-depth understanding about managerial perceptions towards organizational change in emerging markets, like that of India. Hence, there has been a felt need for a generic model that covers such change management aspects across various industry verticals in emerging markets like India, that will provide practicing managers a better understanding of managing change. This doctoral research tries to find out the aspects of managing change as viewed by the practitioners on field, the Change Agents – the managers of today, who are strategizing, implementing and managing organization wide changes. The research comprised of three steps, beginning with a detailed literature review, spanning over 69 years of management research. Post reviewing the literature, a series of in-depth interviews were carried on to find congruence with the aspects of change management derived from the literature survey. After the in-depth interviews, the subsequent step was to conduct Focus Group Discussions across many organizations representing various sectors and industries in India. A Primary Survey Research followed this. Once the primary research was done and the responses were found to be valid and reliable, a dependency model was formulated explaining the relationship between these aspects and how they impact each other while an organizational change takes place. The respondents were carefully chosen from various industries, pan India and focus was typically on middle management as they are mostly responsible for driving change, albeit, the top management acts as initiators. This doctoral study was conducted through the triangulation method and came up with the major aspects that stimulates managerial perceptions, and the aspects influencing each aspect and hence maps the managerial perception towards change in organizations. The research findings also include the possible inter relations among these aspects of the change management aspects and to what magnitude each aspect affects the initiative of change. The research postulates findings that may become critical for managing change in emerging arenas, especially with respect to the developing countries. This research will help the decision makers to understand the critical aspects that they should focus on from the day they conceive the idea of managing change. Instead of going through the complex myriads and mesh of how to manage change that will lead to their desired outcome, it will provide them with a simple yet robust model for choosing which all handful aspects or features to consider that would really matter for a successful change initiative and how much weight should each aspect demand. The weight would mean various types of resource allocation; both in terms of financials as well as organizational time and also in terms of signaling the criticality of change will now become easier for decision makers across various industry segments in India. Management scientists have been researching on issues of change management since over several decades now, and numerous researches have been published on this forte with respect to different stakeholders and different circumstances. For instance, managing change has been studied with respect to organizational work activity (Karl E Weick etal, 1999), leadership aspects (Eisenbach etal, 2000), psychodynamics (Carr, 2001), project management (Korin, Kendra, Kaplin, 2005), health service organizations (Rees and Hassard, 2010) and many other perspectives. Though, there has not been any study that focuses on how the change agents, who are actually responsible for implementing the change initiatives on field, look at the phenomenon. Moreover, there has been a dearth of such study in the context of the developing nations. This research focuses on the regimes of the perception of the managers at the backdrop of the Indian subcontinent. The research, thus, is unique on account of both the outlook as well as the backdrop of the study.