Wichita Facility
Where would you place the Wichita change initiative on all four dimensions of change initiatives described in the reading Organizational Change: An Overview (i.e., scope, source, pacing, and process)?
Scope of change: the scope of change involves aspects such as “how work is done and by whom, who makes decisions and controls resources, what activities and resources have status and value, what the company should be and how it should be seen (Ancona, et. al., 2005, p. M8-15).” Scope can be either radical which involves fundamental changes in the organization or incremental, which are local. In this case, the Wichita change was incremental, meaning that all changes were done at the local level, specific to the needs of the Wichita location.
Pacing: the pacing of change involves whether it is punctuated, meaning there is a clear beginning and end, or continuous, meaning it proceeds over time and leads to another change. In this case, the pacing of change was continuous, as it proceeded over time. Initially, there may have been a desire to have a clear beginning and end, but the process did take longer than planned. As mentioned in the textbook, continuous change involves ongoing experimentation and improvement. An example of this is the problem chat. Initially, no one showed up to the chats, but over time, more employees found use of it. They were able to evolve the problem chat to include actual fixes to issues mentioned. Another example is with the team-building. While the problem chats fixed issues, there was still some tension between groups. To fix this, they instituted and experimented with softball games, which ended up being a huge success.
Source: the source of change is whether it is driven by top management (top-down) or initiated further down the organization (bottom-up). In this case, I believe that the source of change was from the bottom-up. Although it was identified by top management needed to change, it ended up being the employees who
Scope of change: the scope of change involves aspects such as “how work is done and by whom, who makes decisions and controls resources, what activities and resources have status and value, what the company should be and how it should be seen (Ancona, et. al., 2005, p. M8-15).” Scope can be either radical which involves fundamental changes in the organization or incremental, which are local. In this case, the Wichita change was incremental, meaning that all changes were done at the local level, specific to the needs of the Wichita location.
Pacing: the pacing of change involves whether it is punctuated, meaning there is a clear beginning and end, or continuous, meaning it proceeds over time and leads to another change. In this case, the pacing of change was continuous, as it proceeded over time. Initially, there may have been a desire to have a clear beginning and end, but the process did take longer than planned. As mentioned in the textbook, continuous change involves ongoing experimentation and improvement. An example of this is the problem chat. Initially, no one showed up to the chats, but over time, more employees found use of it. They were able to evolve the problem chat to include actual fixes to issues mentioned. Another example is with the team-building. While the problem chats fixed issues, there was still some tension between groups. To fix this, they instituted and experimented with softball games, which ended up being a huge success.
Source: the source of change is whether it is driven by top management (top-down) or initiated further down the organization (bottom-up). In this case, I believe that the source of change was from the bottom-up. Although it was identified by top management needed to change, it ended up being the employees who
References: Ancona, D. G. (2005). Managing for the future: organizational behavior & processes (3rd ed.). Mason, OH: Thomson/South-Western.