2.1.3. The management of change: phases and factors

Change needs to be managed. The key task of management is to respond to pressures from the external and internal environments through adapting strategy, structure and operational processes of the organisation. Organisations that do not respond to change such as increasing competition, new legislation or the expectations of stakeholders, will decline or in the worst case cease to exist.

There are many models and methods about change management in literature. Most change models suggest a series of phases to go through and steps to be taken by management.

The change process can be treated as a project cycle with preparing, planning, designing, implementing, evaluating and where necessary adjusting the outcome of the change process. It can also be simplified into three phases of planning, implementing and consolidating change.

Another well-known model by John P. Kotter⁴ which became a classic in change management distinguishes eight different steps which are considered necessary for successful large-scale change.

Change" class="wp-image-10553 size-full" height="319" src="https://sgbs.ch/wp-content/uploads/Table-2-The-Eight-Steps-for-Successful-Change.jpg" width="618"> Table 2: The Eight Steps for Successful Change

While Kotter’s focus is on private corporations, research carried out by S. Fernandez and H.G Rainy in 2006⁵ provides an overview of literature on organisational change in public organisations. They bring some order to the literature by focusing on points of consensus and argue that change leaders and change participants in public organisations should pay special attention to eight factors. In many ways this resembles the research carried out on corporations, however with some key differences. The change process is seen less as a linear progression of successive steps, but rather as different factors which influence the outcome of change initiatives at different stages of the process. Also the factors differ somehow from Kotter ’ s model as they are specific to public sector organisations.

Factor 1: Ensure the Need

Implementation of change generally requires that leaders verify the need for change and persuade other members of the organisation and important stakeholders that it is necessary. Effective public managers verify the need for change through “listening and learning” and then communicate those needs in ways that build support for change. Often, public sector leaders take advantage of mandates, political windows of opportunity and external influences to verify and communicate the need for change.

Factor 2: Provide a Plan

The new vision of how the organisation should look like needs to be translated into a strategy with goals and a plan for achieving them. This strategy serves as a road map for the organisation, offering direction on how to arrive at the preferred end state. It ensures that change does not disintegrate into a set of unrelated and confusing actions.

Factor 3: Overcome Resistance and Build Internal Support for Change

Successful public leaders understand that they need to overcome resistance. For decades, researchers have emphasized the importance of a participatory approach to build internal support. Participation should be widespread and span all phases of the change process. Successful implementation of organisational change often combines elements of lower-level participation with direction from top management.

Factor 4: Ensure Top Management Support and Commitment

Some studies for organisational change stress the importance of having a single change agent lead the transformation. Others suggest the need to have a guiding coalition, for instance a group of people lending legitimacy to the effort and mobilizing the resources and emotional support necessary for change. Whether it occurs in the form of a single change agent or in form of a guiding coalition, support and commitment of top management is essential.

Factor 5: Build External Support

Organisational change depends on the degree of support from political overseers and other key external stakeholders. Public organizations often have multiple political masters pursuing different objectives. They have the ability to impose statutory changes and control the flow of resources to public organization and thus can have an important influence on the outcome of planned change.

Factor 6: Provide Resources

A fairly consistent finding in literature is that change is not cheap or without trade-offs. Sufficient funding is necessary to adequately staff public organisations, train employees in new skills, develop new processes and provide them with the administrative and technical capacity to achieve the change objectives.

Factor 7: Institutionalize Change

To make change enduring employees must learn new behaviours in the shortterm and leaders must institutionalize them over the long run so that new patterns replace old ones. This is the most critical part of the change process. Managers need to collect data and monitor the implementation process. Evaluation and monitoring efforts should continue even after the change is fully adopted to ensure that organisational members do not fall back into old patterns of behaviour.

Factor 8: Pursue Comprehensive Change

Management must develop an integrative comprehensive approach to change, which includes structural changes to the subsystems of their organisation, paying attention to how subsystems are interlinked. For instance it is fruitless to attempt to change behaviours towards more teamwork if the organisational structure remains strictly hierarchical and staff evaluation systems reward individual progress.

⁴ Kotter, John.P: Leading Change, Boston 1996, Harvard Business School Press
⁵ Fernandez S., Rainey H.G.: Managing Successful Organizational Change in the Public Sector, in Public Administration Review, April 2006, pp 168 - 176