Understanding and Coping with Change
Mia A. Rapier
BUS 610: Organizational Behavior
Dr. Anthony Trotta
October 12, 2014
Change is a term most are familiar with, and within the confines of business, change is expected; managers are promoted and replaced by new staff, turnover with first-line employees can be common place, and the inevitable, resignation (or termination) because a person has outgrown a position or employer is commonplace. “A new paradigm has cascaded over what was once taken for granted in the places where we work. We can no longer assume that things will stay as they have been— all [are] vulnerable to swift and drastic change” (Jeffreys, 1995). It is the intent of this paper to analyze the internal and external factors contributing to an individual’s resistance to change. This will be illustrated vis-à-vis a personal narrative involving my mother and a recent organizational shift which resulted in change, and ultimately her lack of trust in the organizations management. Workplace reorganization is oftentimes an attempt to increase profits or improve the efficiency of a department but frequently it results in a type of change for an employee, or group of employees, that causes feelings of distrust, anger, or resentment with upper-management. For the purpose of this paper I will detail (with her consent), the organizational change that my mother coped with just one-year ago. My mother has worked in non-profit social services for three decades, working the greater part of that time in middle and upper-management. She has been working for her current employer for nearly seventeen years with consistent promotions and accolades and just last year during a standard company reorganization, a ‘re-org’ that she typically contributed to, she was told that effective the following week, she would be moving to a much smaller organizational site twenty miles away. To say that she was shocked was an understatement; since she has always been privy to and a collaborator for all reorganizations, she was understandably taken aback. As the legitimacy of this re-org and the magnitude of this “lateral move” was digested by my mother her first reaction was that of betrayal. She felt betrayed by her organizational peers, the people she worked with day-to-day to ensure an effective running of their department and subordinates, but also with the company’s management at-large. Feeling blindsided by this change led to her feelings of mistrust, our text Organizational Behavior (2012) notes that lack of trust in management makes employees question company motives “in essence thinking or asking, ‘What are they really up to when they asked for this change?’” (Baack, 2012). My mother was told that her expertise was needed at the smaller job site to help implement many of the services employed at her current office, that her salary and bonuses would remain the same and that it was simply a lateral move within the organization but the reality of the relocation became apparent quickly and further fueled my mother’s distrust of upper-management. Her new job site required that she perform a mere twenty-five percent of her typical job duties in relation to the significantly smaller staff, job site, and programming at the new job site. Applying Kotter's Eight-Step Plan to explain the reorganization and subsequent change my mother faced, we begin by outlining each step of the plan and how it directly relates. According to Baack (2012), the first step involves establishing a sense of urgency and a compelling reason to make the change – for the upper-mangers that required my mother to change their reasoning involved having a more experienced manager lead a smaller site to implement new programming tactics to make it more successful. The second step requires forming a power coalition to lead the change, in the case of my mother her immediate manager initiated the change and was supported by members of the executive board. The third
