Understanding and Leading Change in Organizations

The provided report discusses the intricacies of leading change in organizations, encompassing a range of leadership approaches and their influence on follower responses to complex change. The assignment explores theoretical frameworks and practical applications, highlighting the significance of authentic leadership, organization development, and green supply chain management. It also examines case studies from various industries, including healthcare, education, and policing, to illustrate the challenges and opportunities associated with leading change. Through a critical analysis of existing literature and real-world examples, this assignment aims to provide students with a comprehensive understanding of change leadership concepts and strategies.

Understanding and Leading
Change

Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................1
LO1: Compare ways in which change impacts on an organisation’s strategy and operations........1
LO2: Evaluate the influences that drivers of change have on organisational behaviour.................3
LO3: Determine how barriers to change influence leadership decision-making.............................7
LO4: Apply a range of leadership approaches to a change initiative..............................................9
CONCLUSION..............................................................................................................................10
REFERENCES..............................................................................................................................12

INTRODUCTION
Organizational changes are the changes of strategies, processes, technologies, operational
method and culture and the effect of these changes to the organization (Understanding and
leading change, 2018). Changes are the sometimes required and most of the times are forced to
do because of the changing strategies of rivals. These changes can be frequent and sometimes for
a specific period of time. In this report, changes in Waitrose is explained with its effect and
measures to cure from the effect. Waitrose is a chain of British supermarkets having its
headquarter in Bracknell, Berkshire, England. This company mainly deals in food retail division
which makes it sixth largest retailer of groceries in UK. In this project, different ways by which
organizations strategies are affected and the influence of drivers of change in organizational
behaviour is discussed. Apart from that, different barriers to change influence leadership
decision-making and range of leadership approaches to change initiative is also discussed.
LO1: Compare ways in which change impacts on an organisation’s strategy
and operations
Impact of changes on an organizations strategies and operations with the help of different
organizational examples.
Changes are sometimes required by an organization to change their previous strategies to
compete them with their rivals. On the other hand, sometimes these changes are must to put into
organization since their business strategies are not meeting the requirement of its customers. The
position and perception of company also affects the changes required. It has its negative and
positive impact on the organization (Alavi, 2017). The position of company is all about its image
in market which has a great impact on the changes required. Waitrose is a large company hence
it has to change its strategy of business according to the large scale of customers. There can be
two aspects here, the positive aspect shows that company can manage its changes according to
different segments of customers but changes on a large scale which is not easy, shows a negative
impact on the strategies of company. Here with the help of two organizations, difference is
shown that how change impact on different organizational strategies, operations, process,
technology and culture.
Change Waitrose Marks & Spencer
Organizational Structure The organizational structure The organizational structure
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used in Waitrose is
hierarchical . In this structure,
decision is taken by the person
having position in hierarchy.
This structure helps in making
quick decision-making.
followed by M&S is flat. The
changes occurred using this
type of structure helps the
company in the involvement of
its employees in decision
making. This increases their
job responsibility.
Organizational Culture Waitrose follows a strong
culture of innovation and
involvement of employees into
the organization (Anderson,
2016). This culture strengths
the operations of the company
and hence strategies can be
made accordingly.
M&S follows role culture, in
which role of each individual
is assigned and allowed to
work for it accordingly. This
culture helps in increasing the
job responsibility of an
employee towards the
company. Therefore it also
helps to manage the operations
department and strategies.
Pricing strategies Waitrose don't follows the
strategies are followed by
others. It provides values for
its member customers rather
than discounting and lowering
of prices (Bascia, 2014). This
helps in increasing the image
of it in the minds of customers
and thus it strengths the
bonding between customer and
company.
M&S follows a dynamic
pricing policy. In this policy, it
changes the pricing strategies
according to season. In festive
season it also provides
discounts to its customers
which attracts them to their
store and hence increasing
their productivity.
Technology It emphasises on promoting
brand through its own mobile
It emphasises on promoting its
brand through social media
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application by which it
operates its business. This
promotion helps the company
to increase its demand and
helps in high productivity of
the organization.
platform This promotion helps
the company in increasing its
brand name among the
customers which are although
not using it's products. This
will increase the demand and
hence production increases.
Marketing Strategy This company has a great
investment in the advertising
of its products. To advertise, it
emphasises on bundle pricing
strategy through which the
customers attracts. This helps
the operations to increase their
selling.
This company also emphasise
on advertising but they mainly
focus on psychological pricing
(Byers, 2017). This mainly
attracts the customers to their
doors and helps to increase the
business.
LO2: Evaluate the influences that drivers of change have on organisational
behaviour
Ways through which internal and external drivers of change affect leadership, team and
individual behaviours
There are two types of changes by which leadership, teams and individual's behaviours
are affected.
Internal Drivers of change
Following are the drivers of internal changes.
Resources:
Resources are the basics of an organization which can include human resources raw
materials etc. If the resources are not managed properly by Waitrose then the affect of this on
behaviours of:
 Leadership: Leadership is the ability of leader in which it makes the objectives and goals
of organization (Jabbour, 2015). In Waitrose, if resources are not managed properly then
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the goals and objectives set by the leader cannot be achieved. This can affect the
performance and productivity of organization.
 Teams: Teams are make to perform a specific task which should be specific in the goals
and objectives set by the leader (Doppelt, 2017). If human resources are not managed
properly in team, then the performance of each employee will not go to meet the
requirement set by leader. This will adversely affect the performance of team and hence
the goals and objectives of Waitrose cannot be achieved. Individual: Individual are assigned to perform a specific task so as to achieve the target
set by leader of Waitrose. If the essentials of an individual is not satisfied then it can
adversely affect its performance. This will increase dissatisfaction in employee and the
task assigned to it will not be achieved by its goal.
Dissatisfaction:
This phenomenon adversely affect the performance of an individual and team and hence
the leadership also affected. The affect of this internal change on:
 Leadership: A leader has role of assigning task to its followers. If task assigned to its
followers get misinterpreted and not get a proper direction to achieve, this leads to
dissatisfaction to the leader. This will surely affect its performance and the goals and
objectives of Waitrose cannot be achieved.
 Teams: A team can be dissatisfied by the task assigned to it is not achievable. The task
assigned to each employee in team should be achievable (Drover and Ariel, 2015). If
dissatisfaction occurs, this will surely affect their performance and hence the productivity
of Waitrose also decreased.
 Individual: They are assigned to perform a specific task, if task is not specific and varies,
it will dissatisfy the individual. This phenomenon will also affect its performance and the
performance and hence productivity of Waitrose affected directly.
External drivers of change
The drivers of external changes are as follows:
Political:
Political changes occurs when the government of a country in which business is operating
is not stable. The affect of this instability on the behaviour of:
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 Leadership: A leader has the responsibility of setting up the goals of Waitrose. It is
operating its business in UK. If there is political instability in UK, this will influence the
working of a leader and hence also affects its behaviour of decision-making.
 Team: If the goals set by a leader changes frequently due to political instability, this will
affect the working performance of a team (Glassandand, 2015). Since task assigned will
not remain specific hence, their behaviour is also affected adversely to manage the goals
accordingly. This will decrease the performance of Waitrose. Individual: If performance of leaders is affected by political instability then the
individuals behaviour will affected automatically and hence decrease the Waitrose
productivity.
Economical:
If economy of UK is fluctuating and the purchasing power of customers is not good, then
affect of this change on the behaviour of:
 Leadership: The behaviour of leader affected when purchasing power of customers is
low, they have to change their policy and decrease the price of their product. Waitrose
will face serious consequences of this situation.
 Teams: Due to change in policy, the performance of teams affected. The profit of
Waitrose will decrease consequently. Individual: If economical changes are frequent and people have not so much money to
purchase, the employee of Waitrose can be fired from the organization to cut the cost.
Social:
In UK social factor includes the increase in demand of product Waitrose among
customers. The affect of these changes on :
 Leadership: If demand increases rapidly then the policies made by leader should be
change accordingly (Cook, 2016). Hence this will increase its power of bearing pressure
and its performance will increase.
 Teams: There will be test for the team at the time of high demand. This will surely
increase their pressure and performance. Individual: Increase in demand will increase the performance of an individual. This will
surely help Waitrose to increase its productivity.
Technological:
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If technology changes in Waitrose, then the effect of this on:
 Leadership: Due to technological changes, a leader should provide more flexibility to its
followers in order to adopt the new technology (Hillson and Murray-Webster, 2017. This
will increase faith of followers to it.
 Teams: Teams should adopt new technology and implement on their work. This will help
them to improve their efficiency and productivity. Individuals: As above individuals should also adopt new technology and hence improve
their performance and productivity.
Measures to minimize negative impact of change on organizational behaviour.
Following are the measures to minimize the negative impact of change on organizational
behaviour.
Change should be clearly defined and aligned to business goals
The organization should clearly define the changes which are must because without
specifying these changes it cannot be implemented by a leader. It must require a critical review
to analyse the pros and cons of that change. The change should meet the organizational goals and
objectives so that business of Waitrose will go in right direction. This step also help in
identifying the inputs and efforts required to invest. Therefore this step determines the
requirements and need of change.
Determining the impact of change
Once the change is clearly defined, now is the turn to determine the impact of such
changes on each level of organization (Jacobs, Rouse and Parsons, 2014). The changes which are
going to make should meet the goal of each level at Waitrose. The effect of such changes should
be critically analysed so that particular change is meeting the structure of organization. This
process will determine to know where this change is affecting the most and whether it is required
or not. This step also helps to form a blue print to determine where the training and support is
required most.
Communication among leaders and followers.
After get to know about where the change is needed, there should be effective
communication among the leaders and followers to know the followers what change is going to
do. This is necessary for the employee of Waitrose to know because they are going to face such
changes. The communication should be effective enough so that employee can be motivated to
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go for changes. After getting to know for employees about the changes, the leaders should be
ready for the feedback from employees. If the feedback is necessary for the implementation of
change then it should be attained by the leaders.
Effective training.
After the third step, an effective training session is required for the employees, so that
they will be prepared for the new change applied. In Waitrose, if technological change is applied
than employees who are required to use that technology should be trained enough to implement
the changes (Lopez and Wise, 2015). The training can be provided by face to face sessions or by
online modules which must include all the required knowledge to implement such changes. This
training session also let to know about the required skills for a change. The training delivery
sessions should be effective enough so that it helps the employee to learn.
Implementation of support structure
In the training session, an employee should be assisted by a support structure so that it
may be helped to build proficiency of behaviours and technical skills to meet the goal of
Waitrose. Most of the times there can be redundancy in the changes occurred, so as to overcome
such issue a support should be there to help the employees in navigating the situation. In order to
help the employee, a mentor with open door policy should be established to ask any question.
This step is helpful in finding the type of support require to implement a change.
Measuring the changing process
This is the final step of minimizing the negative impact on organizational behaviour
(Rogers and Marres, 2016.). The changes which are implementing, at a situation should be
measured in a way that whether they are going in a right direction or not. If there are any changes
required to implement in order to achieve the desires of Waitrose, then it should be implemented.
This step also helps to find the whether the change management process is successful or not.
Through this process, a leader is able to know about other solution in case of failure.
LO3: Determine how barriers to change influence leadership decision-
making.
Different barriers of change and how it influence leadership decision making
When there is a change, their is a barrier. A company should bring change after analysing
the forces that supports the changes or resist the change. Waitrose is a supermarket chain which
provides products of different company and did not manufacture anything on their own. Waitrose
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should start manufacturing as they have the resources which is needed by the company to
produce and apart from that they have a brand equity in the market which can help the company
to sell more. Force field analysis is a method of monitoring and analysing the forces which can
affect the change which will make by the company in the future (Rogers, 2016). If the driving
forces are bigger and stronger than the restraining forces than Waitrose should made the change
and vice versa. While analysing the forces, each forces should be assigned a points according to
their importance and maximum points should decide that company should go for a change or
they should not. Force field analysis with functional example is discussed below,
Driving forces: These are the kind of forces which supports the company to go for a change.
These forces includes the strength of the Waitrose and how it can help the company to attain
their business objectives. Driving forces of Waitrose is discussed,
 Waitrose should produce unique and different product as customer always seeks for new
products. Waitrose should understand the unmet needs of the customer and then make
their product according to them. (1 point)
 Waitrose is one of the largest supermarket chain in the world thus have enough resources
like funds to start their own projects. (3 points)
 Waitrose is the only supermarket chain in UK which has Royal warrant from the Queen
of England. Hence the goodwill of the company will help the company to increase their
sales. (4 points)
 Due to ample of funds, Waitrose can use latest technology to increase their quality and
reduce their cost price so they can maximize their profits thus helping the gain the
competitive advantage over other. (4 points)
Restraining forces: These are the kind of forces which are against the changes which will be
made by the company. This includes weakness of the company like manpower planning, return
on investment etc. If this forces is more stronger than the driving forces than company should not
apply the changes planned by them. If they are equal to driving forces than company should
modify their plan so to make the driving forces stronger (Marresand, 2016. Restraining forces of
Waitrose are explained below:
Manufacturing business will incur huge cost for the company as the equipments and facility cost
is high when starting for the first time. So the risk of investing the money is high consequently it
will take many years to recover the cost incurred by the Waitrose.( 2 points)
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 Time taken to establish the manufacturing business is high. By the time of making the
plant if any new technology or external factors changes than it will take more time to
replace or modify it thus increase the time and cost for the company, (2 points)
 Manpower planning will be hard as after the plant they have to manage the many
employees (Soehner, 2015). Waitrose work is to reduce the gap between the workforce in
the company and required workforce. Maintaining these work will be hectic and can
affect the profitability of the Waitrose for a shorter period of time. (1 points)
 Waitrose relationship with other brands can be affected in a negative way as after their
personal product they will prefer to sell it to earn more profit rather than selling other
company's product and earns a commission on it.( 4 points)
So according to the above analysis, Waitrose should go for the manufacturing plant as driving
forces has more points overall as compare to the restraining forces.
LO4: Apply a range of leadership approaches to a change initiative.
Different leaderships approaches to deal with changes
Leadership style plays an importance part in the success of the organizations. Leader
work is to help the employees to attain their goals with maximum utilization of resources. Thus
helping the company to improve their performance and productivity. Waitrose should use the
leaderships style according to the scenario. Kurt lewin has proposed change theory model which
helps the company to implement the changes so to attain the highest level of utilization.
According to Change model, leader should follow these steps the implement the change in the
organization i.e., Changes should be made after analysing all the impacts of the change (Wagner,
2016). Beside this structure of the organization should be changed as it will affect the
performance of the employees. At last leader should be sure that implementation is done for the
permanent basis rather than for the shorter period of time. All the three steps of this model will
be discussed below with the help of functional example,
 Unfreeze: This is one of the most crucial stage of the change model as it makes the path
for the employees to change for the betterment. Waitrose leader should opt a
transformational leadership in which they motivates other to change for their betterment
as well as company betterment. Their work is to set the challenging target for the
employees and then help the employees to attain them with their expertise and
knowledge. Communication of the leader is important in this stage as their work is to
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make employees aware of the opportunities they are seeing and how it can help the
employees for their professional and individual growth.
 Change: In this stages employees of the Waitrose are now accepting the change and try to
modify their action according to the requirements of the environment (White and
Robinson, 2014). Waitrose leader should opt participative style in this. Leader work is to
work with the employees to clear the hurdles which they are facing. Effective
communication and motivation is required by the leader in this stage. If the employees
are motivated enough to accomplish their work than leader has achieved their work with
full perfection.
 Unfreeze: This is the last stage of the change in which employees of the Waitrose are
now stable and happy while working and adopting change. In this stage, Waitrose leader
should opt supportive style in which leader should support their employees while
working. For the great work by the employees, Waitrose should reward their employees
with incentives, bonus, trips etc so that they can improve their performance. The
employees are happy from the change and working with their productivity then the vision
they have set while making the change with be achieved.
CONCLUSION
From this report it can be concluded that changes in a business environment should be
implemented well enough to achieve the organizational goal. Sometimes the changes also forced
to change the mission and objective if they are not implemented properly. In this report,
Waitrose is compared with M&S in different aspects of changes which affects the operation and
strategies of companies. After that, the effect of internal and external changes on the behaviour
of leadership, teams and individuals is discussed. The effect of barriers to change influence
leadership decision-making and range of leadership approaches to change initiative is also
discussed in this report.
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REFERENCES
Books and Journals
Alavi, S. B. and Gill, C., 2017. Leading change authentically: How authentic leaders influence
follower responses to complex change. Journal of Leadership & Organizational
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Anderson, D. L., 2016. Organization development: The process of leading organizational
change. Sage Publications.
Bascia, N. and Hargreaves, A., 2014. The sharp edge of educational change: Teaching, leading
and the realities of reform. Routledge.
Byers, V., 2017. The challenges of leading change in health‐care delivery from the front‐
line. Journal of nursing management. 25(6). pp.449-456.
de Sousa Jabbour, A. B. L., 2015. Understanding the genesis of green supply chain management:
lessons from leading Brazilian companies. Journal of Cleaner Production. 87. pp.385-
390.
Doppelt, B., 2017. Leading change toward sustainability: A change-management guide for
business, government and civil society. Routledge.
Drover, P. and Ariel, B., 2015. Leading an experiment in police body-worn video
cameras. International Criminal Justice Review. 25(1). pp.80-97.
Glass, C. and Cook, A., 2016. Leading at the top: Understanding women's challenges above the
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Hillson, D. and Murray-Webster, R., 2017. Understanding and managing risk attitude.
Routledge.
Jacobs, S., Rouse, P. and Parsons, M., 2014. Leading change within health services: The theory
behind a systematic process for leading the implementation of new services within a
network structure. Leadership in Health Services. 27(2). pp.72-86.
Lopez, P. and Wise, D., 2015. Leading Change for the Implementation of Common Core State
Standards in Rural School Districts. Education Leadership Review of Doctoral
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Rogers, R. and Marres, N., 2016. Landscaping climate change: A mapping technique for
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Understanding of Science.
Soehner, C. B., 2015. Leading change in libraries: A case study. Library Leadership &
Management. 29(2).
Wagner, W. E., 2016. Leadership for a better world: Understanding the social change model of
leadership development. John Wiley & Sons.
White, V. and Robinson, S., 2014. Leading change in policing: police culture and the
psychological contract. The Police Journal. 87(4). pp.258-269.
Yoder-Wise, P. S., 2014. Leading and managing in nursing-E-Book. Elsevier Health Sciences.
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Understanding and leading change. 2018. [Online]. Available
through:<https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/change.asp>
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