SYDNEY BUSINESS SCHOOL

Large Scale Change

Process in an
Organization
TBS903 – Managing People in
Organizations

Luanne Sequeira
Student No. 3783546

Word Count: 3,000

 Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Need for Change
3. Appointing the right consultant
4. Analysis of the Problem
✔ Climate and Culture
✔ The CEO & Principal’s roles in the university:
✔ Division between staff members
1. Suggesting the Change
2. Crash of the New Structure
3. Issues during the intervention; the Consultant’s perspective:
✔ Promoter’s commitment
✔ Consultant’s role
✔ Informal Information
1. Recommendations
✔ Prepare to lead change
✔ Adequate and Ongoing communication:
✔ Empowering Actions
1. Conclusion

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Executive Summary

This report is aimed at identifying a large scale change management process in an

organisation and analysing what led to this change. The report covers the process in
introducing change, the steps taken by the management, challenges faces while introducing
the change and the management’s approach to this. It also underlines the issues faced by
the consultant suggesting the change and her experiences of working within this
organisation. The report talks about a very interesting yet complex organisational
environment to introduce a change process but seeks to help readers understand the
intricacies involved in organisational change. You will notice the author has picked out
specific interpretation and theories of change management to help throw light on specific
areas of change management and best practices that could be adopted while introducing
change. The main purpose

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 1. Introduction

This report identifies a large scale change management process undertaken by the Maritime
Engineering Institute, a well known engineering college in India.

It looks at the reason and issues that brought about this need for change. It outlines an effort
made by the organisation to inculcate change by inviting a leading business school
professor to stay on campus and observe the day to day activities of the institute and
according suggest change.

Through the report you will understand what drove this institute to implement a change
process and the experiences and observations of the business school professor. It also
outlines the challenges faced by the management, employee reactions to this change and
the management’s final approach to handling this change.

We also look at how effective was the entire change process and its impact on the
institution’s employees mainly being its staff members. I will also give my suggestions and
recommendations of best practices that could have been adopted.

2. The Need for Change:

The literature of organizational development efforts in universities or schools is sparse

(Griffin, 2006). There is a call for continued research of organizational development
initiatives in academic settings (Torraco & Hoover, 2005).

Maritime Institute was a privately owned engineering college providing marine and nautical
technology courses to candidates. It was located in a far away village but was a self
sufficient organisation that provided enough to its residents. All students, faculty and other
staff members would stay on campus itself. The proprietors spend almost around six million
dollars on setting up the institute and initially managed the entire operations themselves.
Overtime as the college began to grow, they decided to hire a professional team of

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individuals to manage the business and reduce their involvement in the institute daily
workings (Vohra, 2009).

The Maritime Institute had been an established college for about 5 years before the need for
change came into light. The institute’s board of directors consisted of a CEO and Principal at
the top who then managed two different business lines mainly operations and academics
respectively. Overtime the management started to feel problems trickling in which mainly
revolved around commitment, disciplinary issues with students, and high attrition rates
among staff which also led to staff members dividing themselves into groups and finally
leading to no professional growth opportunities. Overtime and competition from other
institutes grew, it became more difficult to retain staff and also attract more students. The
CEO of the Institute started to feel the need to hire an outside consultant to examine such
issues and observe the institute’s approach to corporate governance. This consultant would
then suggest required changes that need to take place in the institute. This was to be a 3
month effort but the consultant and management during which the consultant would stay on
the campus (Nair, 2009).

3. Appointing the Right Consultant:

A lot of meetings and discussions happened between the CEO, Principle and the promoters’
in order to decide who would be the right consultant to appoint for the job. After a series of
discussions, the consultant, a professor of a leading business school was appointed. On
being briefed of her involvement in the change process, she agreed and took up the role.

The consultant was given her own accommodation away from the rest of the staff and
students quarters and also provided with office facilities. She started her analysis by taking
one to one meetings with the staff members, management and students. She introduced
herself and explained the purpose of her meetings. This gave her an idea and understanding
of the institute, its culture, day to day operations, its history etc. (Nair, 2009).

4. Analysis of the Problems:

Through her meetings, talks and observations the consultant was able to diagnose the
reason behind the issues and problems faced within the university.

✔ Climate and Culture:

Climate and culture form very important aspects of any organisation. These aspects help
employees understand their work environment. Both climate and culture are largely learned
from socialisation and symbolic interaction among groups of people (Reichers and
Schneider 1990: 29).

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The culture and climate in the university was mainly influenced by low motivation levels. Due
to lack of interaction or mere socialising with each other. There was also no kind of rewards
or recognition given for employees who performed well. This system was considered
extremely unfair. It was also perceived that you had to be well known to the senior
management in order to receive any awards. Staff was often isolated and started to lack
commitment due to boredom. (Vohra, 2009).

✔ The CEO & Principal’s roles in the university:

This university strangely has two head of staff members, the CEO and Principle. It was
believed that the promoters had employed the principal to manage the institute on personal
relationships however eventually were getting tired of his management skills and hence
decided to employ another right hand man to take over some part of the business. This led
to the appointment of the CEO who then mainly looked after non-academic operations.
However they seemed to be a very thin line between the job roles of the two and often it
clashed leading to misunderstanding and confusion among them and staff. There was no
more reporting structure as far as the two of them were concerned (Nair, 2009).

The current governing system of institutes providing higher education has now moved from
being a collegial system driven by academics to being a professionally managed system.
This experienced clashes with the professional managers and academics (Allen, 2003).

✔ Division between staff members:

There seem to be a divide between the technical and non technical staff members of the
institute. The issue was the difficulty in finding technical staff which forced the management
to pay higher salaries to these staff rather than the non technical ones. Additionally the
technical staff was older and more mature individual since they normally came with previous
marine experience. Due to this students also started leveraging on this kind of culture and
mainly showed more interest in the more senior staff and neglecting the general professors
that did not have technical experience (Vohra, 2009).

1. Suggesting the change

There were different areas where change was required like the salary increase for non
technical staff and the change in the reporting structure or organizational chart. However the
main change that the consultant put forward was for the institute to be re-structured in order
to consolidate operations and have one type of head of department. (Allen 2003) suggests
that the best way to be successful in an organization is to have the academics and
operations work together as one body. Hence it was important to have the management of
MEI work together in order to implement the new structure. Through a series of meetings
and discussion with the board and promoters, the new structure was finally agreed upon.
The consultant helped the management make an informed decision and create the right
structure by advicing them about common structures in other business schools. The final
structure would not have two people heading but just one, the CEO. His designation would
be changed to Director and he would oversee the entire business. The CEO’s position
though would then go one to focus on other areas like research and consulting within the
institute (Vohra & Nair, 2009).

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The new structure was introduced to the staff members by the CEO in a meeting and they
were assured that they would receive a further detailed run through of the reasons for
change and the benefits of this new structure. This was to be done through a workshop by
the consultant. Overtime the workshops began to run for different aspects mainly being; to
help staff understand the new structure, to facility student feedback and to collectively
finalise on the identity of MEI (Nair, 2009).

2. Crash of the new structure:

People easily avoid change because of various reasons, one of which is because they do
not completely understand why the change has been brought about or may see the new
direction from the organization’s view. Also sometimes employees get insecure about the
impact that the change will have on their own jobs (Gotsill & Natchez, 2007).

Similarly with MEI, within just a few weeks of the workshops and the new structure being
implemented, things started to fall out of place. The principle expressed his desire to resign
from his services and this information reached the promoters of MEI who were very
disappointed. They immediately intervened and requested him not to go and agreed to fix
things as per his need. Sometime from then other senior staff also decided to resign and
once again were asked to stay by promising them certain favours. Overtime this became a
practice and the promoters managed to retain their staff however not to the approval of the
consultant as she felt that they were going against the entire change process. The
consultant tried to reason out with the promoters and help them see the big picture that
change management was a process and when implemented, they were likely to encounter
resistance. However the promoters refused to listen and continued to make decisions and
carry out what they would see as damage control without keeping the consultant in the loop
(Vohra, 2009).

3. Issues during the intervention; the Consultant’s perspective:

Leadership’s commitment and approach to change efforts is crucial for effective change
(Kotter, 1996). As stated this is a critical part of introducing and implementing change in any
organisation. Unfortunately this wasn’t the case for MEI as the promoters expressed the
need for change without really being prepared to be committed to the process and adopting
the right approach to this change.

The consultant faced quite a few issues through the process of implementing the change:

✔ Promoter’s commitment:
The most important issue faced during the intervention was that of the commitment of the
promoters. It seems that the promoters wanted the institute to be transformed into a world
class university but were not prepared for the change process. At the start of the process,
they expressed extremely high commitment levels by facilitating constant communication
with the consultant and keeping her up to date with their interactions with staff members
(Vohra, 2009). At the start of any change process or before finalising the change to be
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implemented, the management must conduct a thorough needs assessment to analysis the
organisation’s needs and its personnel (Torraco & Hoover, 2005). However, in the case of
MEI this was not so and as the staff started to resist the change, the promoters immediately
caved in on their commitment and communication from and with them became less frequent.
On one occasion, the consultant wrote a detailed letter to the promoters underlining their
approach to the principle and other staff resigning and suggesting how best to deal with the
situation but they did not communicate back (Nair, 2009).

✔ Consultant’s role:
Whether the consultant should get involved in the implementation of the change process is
something that has been questioned before (Juras, Mackin, Curtis & Foster-Fishman, 1997).
Since the consultant appointed was a professor from a leading business school in India and
hence appointed to suggest changes in the workings of the institute. The management
chose this consultant as they were not equipped with knowledge of the latest best practises
and strategies adopted by universities. However at the time of appointed the consultant’s
role was and involvement in the intervention was not clearly defined and hence posed
problems once the change process was introduced (Vohra, 2009).

✔ Informal Information:
Another issue that the consultant faced was informal information or rather what became
grapevine within MEI. The wife of the principle also worked as a visiting faculty in the school
and may overtime have got insecure about her job on account of the CEO’s wife being a
more experienced professor in the institute. This led her to think that since the CEO came
into the institute, there started to be misunderstanding and confusion. This may have led her
to create rumours among other staff about adopting new change and hence resistance came
even stronger than expected (Vohra & Nair, 2009).

Among the talk about issues there were other smaller issues such as keeping within
boundaries in terms of maintaining a professional attitude at work. The consultant did
experience the principle having a personal outburst at one of the meetings which is not
acceptable in professional organisations. Other issues were related to ethical behaviour,
sharing of wrong information or maintaining confidentiality. Having been trained and
grounded in social science research and the dynamics of establishing trust, the author was
conscious about the need to maintain confidentiality (Newman, 1993) and not share
information shared in confidence.

1. Recommendations:

Analysing the change process undertaken by the Maritime Engineering Institute, there are a
few things that went wrong and maybe if managed correctly from the start would have
helped inculcate the structural change better.

✔ Preparing to lead change:

Not just identifying the need for change but proper preparation and commitment towards
making the change happen is what was required in this institute. Leaders are the main
drivers of change in any organisation, planned change management efforts are successful
with the right support and guidance from leaders, this helps gain quicker acceptance from
staff members at lower levels. Even though the project scope and extent determines how
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much support is required, it is essential for leaders to be consistent and determined through
the process (Burke, 2002).

✔ Adequate and Ongoing communication:

Additional proper communication of the change process is essential and could have been
done in the case of MEI. Instead of the change being introduced by the CEO in one of the
meetings, it could have come straight from the promoters where they could outline the need
for change and the vision of the company. Leaders must outline a clear understanding for
the reason for change, a sense of urgency, talk about the benefits from the change, describe
the look of the new organisation and design a plan on getting there (Allen 2003).

✔ Empower Actions:
The promoters could have managed the management and staff’s resistance to change more
effectively. Not allowing the emotions of staff and wrong decisions of the management get in
the way of the change process. Change the way they think! “Get rid of obstacles to change.
Change those systems or structures that seriously undermine the vision. Emphatically
encourage risk taking and non-traditional ideas, activities, and actions” (Kotter, 1996; p21).

1. Conclusion:

The report clearly states that the change process in Maritime Engineering Institute was not
successful however this is a good example of how a change process can go wrong if the
leaders of the organisation are not well equipped to lead this change. Implementing change
in universities or institutions is a lot more difficult as it involves the administration, faculty,
governing board, students and families, other public institutions (Torraco, 2004). It also helps
us understand employee’s tendencies to reject change from the beginning and how this can
either be the reason for the fall out of the process or can be a heads up for the managers to
facilitate ongoing communication and understanding of change to their employees. As the
environment in the higher education environment continues to evolve overtime, change can
be critical in order for the institution to achieve long term success and survival (Kotter, 1995).

2. References

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Organizational insecurity. Higher Education, 46, 61-92.

Angles.J.M (2007). The impact of shared leadership on the effectiveness of self managed
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Burke W.W (2002). Organization Change: Theory and Practice, Thousand Oaks CA: Sage

Floricel.S & Miller.R (2001). Strategizing for anticipated risks and turbulence in large-scale
engineering projects. International journal of Project Management, 19, 445-455

Griffin, M. M. (2006). Applicability of O.D. within a university setting. Organization

Development Journal, 24 (4), 77-83.

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Gotsill & Natchez (2007). From Resistance to Acceptance: How to Implement Change
Management, 24-27.

Juras, J., Mackin, J. Curtis, S., & Foster-Fishman, P.(1997). Key concepts of community
Psychology: Implications for consulting in educational and human service settings.
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Kerno Jr. S (2008). Influences from both inside and outside can force companies into the
same mold. Going along reduces opportunities for change—and chances for survival, 24-27.

Kotter, J. P. (1996). Leading change. Boston: Harvard Business School Press

Kotter, J. P. (1995). Leading change: Why transformation efforts fail. Harvard

Business Review, 73(2), 59-67.

Krakowsky.R.P (2008). Sustaining Change in Higher Education Administrative Student

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Torraco, R. J., & Hoover, R. E. (2005). Organization development and change in

Universities: Implications for research and practice. Advances in Developing Human
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Vohra N & Nair N (2009). Bringing about Large-Scale Change in an Engineering College:
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