Chapter 13

The Management of Change

Areas of Change

1. Technology

  • Products
  • Production
  • Communication
  • Methods of selling
  • Jobs

2. Competitors

  • New products
  • Inorganic growth
  • Globalisation

3. Rules and Regulations

  • National safety, tax and environment
  • EU safety, tax and environment
  • World trade

4. Workforce

  • More educated
  • Expectations
  • More flexible conditions

5. Consumers

  • Trends
  • Choice
  • Quality
  • income

Rate of Change

It took 38 years for 30% of Americans to get the telephone. It took 7 for them to get the internet.

Management and Change

Why Employees are Resistant to Change

  • Fear of losing job
  • Fear of losing promotion prospects
  • Fear of losing earnings (overtime)
  • Fear of more work
  • Fear of not being able
  • Fear that it won’t work
  • Nothing in it for them

Preparing Employees for Change

  • Management skills
  • Honesty
  • Invite participation in decisions
  • Negotiate
  • Reward
  • Training

Strategies for Managing Change

1. Changing from Controller to Facilitator manager

Controller = Theory X or Autocratic

  • Staff never given responsibility and so not developed
  • Staff afraid
  • Staff feel unsupported
  • Manager over-burdened already

Changing to Theory Y or team based style will remove these obstacles

Facilitator = Getting the most out of employees by encouragement, training, support and reward. Style is democratic or Theory Y.

  • Better motivation
  • Better able to handle change
  • Manager’s time freed up.
  1. Job Rotation, Enlargement and Enrichment

Empowerment

Giving greater decision-making power to employees.

Features:

  • Simply giving employees goals, resources and deadlines.
  • Giving them authority to make changes
  • Facilitator-style management.

Benefits:

  • Unlocks hidden talents
  • Greater morale
  • Encourages intrepreneurship and innovation.
  • Employees more willing to accept change in which they had a role in deciding upon.
  • Lower turnover of staff

Problems

  • Mistakes (Nick Leeson and Barings Bank)
  • Reluctance to change
  • Middle management not happy to lose power.

Quality Circles

A group of employees who meet regularly to discuss ways of improving and maintaining quality.

A Japanese idea

Teamwork

A group working together to achieve a common objective. Teams can be long term (sales team) or short term (to develop a new product)

Setting up a team

  • Decide on objectives
  • Set deadlines
  • Supply resources
  • Choose members
  • Choose and rotate leader

Stages in development of teams

  • forming
  • Storming
  • Norming
  • Performing

Advantages of team work

  • Motivation
  • More intrepreneurship and innovation
  • Better decisions
  • Greater understanding of each other’s problems

TQM

What earned the Japanese a reputation for quality

Features

  • Consistent focus on high quality
  • Continuous improvement
  • Right first time
  • Constant review
  • Benchmarking
  • Everyone’s responsibility
  • Recognition and reward

Benefits

  • Reputation (new customers and repeat orders)
  • Less waste
  • Customer willing to pay more
  • Morale

Problems

  • Difficult to change culture
  • Involves Teamwork which may be difficult to introduce (delayering)

Changes in Technology and the Role of Management

Benefits of ICT to management

  • Instant access to internal and external information
  • Spreadsheets save time
  • Desk research
  • Advertise on Web (Ecommerce to sell to consumers, Ebusiness to sell to other businesses, Mcommerce using mobile phones to sell )
  • Ework (teleworking) allows retention of valuable staff who can work at home.
  • Saves cost and supervision of staff

Challenges

  • Cost
  • Breakdowns and viruses
  • Security
  • Data Protection Act
  • Redundancies
  • Re-training

Benefits of Production technology to management

  • CAD
  • CAM (robotics)
  • CIM (computer integrated manufacturing) process controlled and managed by computer, including quality control.