Established in 1983 in Singapore, SMRT, a transport service provider, took over the roles and responsibility to operate Singapore’s Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) when it started its operations back in 1987. From 1987 to 2013, SMRT has grown from a medium sized corporation to a billion dollar Multi-national Company. SMRT now controls the far-reaching MRT and the light rail (LRT) system in Singapore which includes 93 stations which spreads over 136.4 km (as of 2013). Beside the MRT and LRT, SMRT as well owns a fleet of 1,050 Buses which seamlessly connect people to their destination. It was as if this was not enough. The monopolistic company as well a fleet of 3,000 taxis which it leases to its clients. SMRT has a total of 15 subsidiaries based in Singapore, U.A.E and China (SMRT, 2012)
Proposed Project Title: A Research on SMRT’s (S’pore) resistance to change
How resistance to change affects SMRT’s efficiency in the transport industry
(i) To Research on the importance of Change
(ii) To Investigate why change is resisted
(iii) To Search for methods to reduce resistance
To make this huge organisation tick, SMRT employs about 2,700 staff (SMRT, 2012). This would mean to say that implementing a series of change into the organisation would be met with resistance. In the past years, SMRT trains have been hit by poor maintenance issue as their trains were breaking down when it was needed the most (peak-hours) thus affecting their efficiency. After the major breakdowns, SMRT publicly announced numerous of changes. However, there were more break-downs in the following months. A research will be done in this paper to study, investigate and search reasons for this resistance.
2. Literature Review
Change is something most people are afraid of as it sometimes requires a walk into the unknown and it definitely disturbs the status quo of the present environment. The researcher would be discussing this subject matter as shown in the diagram below.
2.1