Organizational Behaviour

Before moving on to the question proper, let me first tackle on the basic terms and concepts for this paper.

First off, you have planned and unplanned change in an organization. Unplanned change usually occurs because of a major, sudden surprise to an organization, which causes its members to respond in a highly reactive and disorganized fashion. So let's say the CEO or Chief Executive Officer suddenly leaves the organization, chaos will rise up. Significant public relations problems occur, poor product performance quickly results in loss of customers, or other disruptive situations arise. Planned change, on the other hand, occurs when leaders in the organization recognize the need for a major change and proactively organize a plan to accomplish the change. Planned change occurs with successful implementation of what you call a Strategic Plan, plan for reorganization, or other implementation of a change of this magnitude. Take note though that planned change, even though based on a proactive and well-done plan, often does not occur in a highly organized fashion. Instead, planned change tends to occur in more of a chaotic and disruptive fashion than expected by participants such as employees.

Organizational Behavior (OB) is the study and application of knowledge about how people, individuals, and groups act in organizations. It does this by what you call a system approach. This is, it interprets people-organization relationships in terms of the whole person, whole group, whole organization, and whole social system. Its purpose is to build better relationships by achieving human objectives, organizational objectives, and social objectives. So, based on the definition above, organizational behavior encompasses a wide range of topics, such as human behavior, leadership, teams, and more but what I will be more focusing on in this paper is change.

Side by side with that is Organizational Development or OD. This is the systematic application of behavioral science knowledge at various levels, such as group, inter-group, organization, etc., to bring about planned change. Its objectives are a higher quality of work-life, productivity, adaptability, and effectiveness. It accomplishes this by changing attitudes, behaviors, values, strategies, procedures, and structures so that the organization can adapt to competitive actions, technological advances, and the fast pace of change within the environment.

To look at it in a more simple perspective, organizational behavior is more on the study and organizational development is more on the application side.

Now, with this, we move on to the main topic of change.

Change is normal, if there wasn't any sort of change, not only with relation to organizations and the business environment, then life would be abnormal. Moreover, there wouldn't be what they call the cycle of life or any other cycle in the matter if there wasn't any change. If an organization prospers, that is change, and if it fails, that is also change. Every organization experiences change in all aspects of its operations. To emphasize a little further, the main reason why change is experienced is due to the changes in the business environment which alternately affects any organization. Change pertains to any deviation from the status quo, and generally is a result of developments in both the internal and external business environments. Organizations are normally immersed in a complex web of change as they continually strive to adapt to changes caused by globalization, increasing customer expectations, technological advancements, and the like.

Change in the workplace may normally involve changes in product configuration such as the product name, version, and package code, policies & procedures such as employment policies or the procedure for the implementation of a new product, processes like how let's say how a butcher shop processes their meat, organizational structure such as a hierarchy, systems like IT systems, strategies such as cost-leadership, and lastly, changes in leadership styles whether autocratic, democratic, or laiseez-fair.

Constant adaptation to these changes is required of the business to prosper or even just to survive. Those organizations refusing to accept and deal with change face the threat of being wiped out by the competition.

Where there is change, no matter how pure and noble the intentions are, there will always be resistance to change. Resistance to change on the part of the employees may be due to reasons such as fear or failure, fear of the unknown, complacency, acceptance of the status quo, lack of reward systems, lack of trust on the competence and credibility of the change agents, and lack of commitment and dedication on the job.

In every phase or stage that an organization passes through, challenges abound and change is inevitable. Organizations are considered living entities that undergo changes with the passage of time, whereby each change that takes place poses several challenges that have to be addressed by the owners or executives in order to survive the present competition.

In response to these challenges, several change initiatives are resorted to by organizations on order not to fall prey to the pitfalls experienced when one refuses to accept and deal with change accordingly.

Although, unfortunately, despite the various continuous efforts of some organizations that employ change tactics, they eventually still experience failure in the end at varying degrees. These change-adaptation failures can be traced to several factors such as inappropriately conceived future states, resistance by employees or groups to accept changes in the workplace accordingly, complacency among the intended recipients of any change initiative, unresponsive strategic options adopted by the organization during transition periods,

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