Modern life subjects numerous changes, many of them quite demanding. One of a leader’s most difficult roles is to guide an organization-a complex entanglement of social, cultural, political, behavioral, and structural factors, smoothly and succesfully through transitions to a new level of functioning. An essential aspect of succesful changes is an awareness that change is occuring, an a knowledge of transition of processes.
A lack of such awareness is likely to lead to problems of adaptation. Any transition will result in organizational functioning being subjected to some degree of stress, depending largely on the extent of the change. In particular, the people in an organization will find new demands being placed upon their behavioral repertoire.
BECOME EFFECTIVE ADMINISTRATORS
To become effective administrators of change, leaders must understand that any transition, be it organizational or personal, will trigger a cycle of reactions that is highly predictable. A leader can expect some degree of stagnation or immobilization when a change is first instigated. The severity of this first stage depends largely on the degree to which the organization holds either positive or negative expectations of the outcome of the change.
What follows is a sense of minimizing the “crisis” of change, a sense of hopefulness, and a regrouping of organizational and individual resources. When the impact of change hits come and departments and individuals start having to cope eith new areas of responsibility, performance can be expected to dip. A phase of readjustment follows. The difficulty of readjusting depends greatly on how “attached” individuals felt to the pretransition situation. There can be a great deal of personal and organizational energy around at this time, as new systems and behaviors are tested and new “life-spaces” are conceptualized and internalized.
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