Organizational Change

Organizational Diagnosis 2 Organizational change, in theory should be fairly straightforward – upper management mandates a change, and lower management and their staff agrees to implement the change, no questions asked. However, any organization that has attempted to go through any kind of change understands it’s not that simple. The most effective change implementation starts with a diagnosis that is shared by many employees at multiple organizational levels (Spector, 2010). Diagnosis is the process of learning about the dynamics of the organization in order to take action intended to improve performance (Spector, 2010).In this paper, I have prepared a change analysis for the customer service department of a financial institution. The reason for the change is due to numerous customer complaints. The customer service department is not meeting the needs of customers. The customer service staff isn’t providing solutions to customers to help resolve their problems. The problem that the financial organization’s customer service department is facing is the lack of authority to make specific decisions about service charges and other costs. Customer service representatives, until now, have been required to address any account charge questions and fees to management. The problem is, however, that this takes time, and it frustrates the customers, especially if management is busy dealing with other issues. The organization, therefore, has mandated that customer service representatives can reverse any account charges for specific reasons. Empowering customer service representatives with these decisions may be complicated. The organization itself is headed toward a more customer-friendly orientation (this is its strategy), so the idea that front-line customer service representatives can make on-the-spot decisions is a compelling one. But this is also a huge change, meaning change protocol is necessary.
John Kotter (1995), in his article about leading

References: Change management - resistance and barriers to change. (n.d.). Retrieved Nov 20, 2010, from http://tutor2u.net/business/strategy/change-management-resistance-barriers.html. Implementation and change models (n.d.). Retrieved 2010, November 20 from http://wps.prenhall.com/wps/media/objects/1460/1495669/laudon_mis_cw_topic_ch12_impl.pdf. Kotter, J.P. (1995, March-April). Leading change: Why transformation efforts fail. Harvard Business Review, 59-67. Spector, B. (2010). Implementing organizational change: Theory into practice (2nd Ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.