Creating Sustainable Change – How to create and sustain change?
February 12, 2025
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Change agents act as the champions or change catalysts. The change agents may play the role of a consultant who assists the client in strategically identifying and implementing solutions for overcoming organizational problems. They play the role of a facilitator and train the client on new skills, changes in the processes, vision, mission and organizational philosophy.
For efficiently handling such diverse roles and building facilitating mechanisms, change agents must possess some special characteristics which would distinguish them from others.
In the opinion of Morris and Shaskin, change agents should be an “extrovert, must have effective interpersonal skills, needs to be creative and a risk taker, and should be good at organizing various activities as per the requirements”.
Havelock and Shaskin identified some of the important characteristics of change agents as well as the organizations which they have denoted by an abbreviation HELP Scores. A detailed description of these characteristics is given below:
Change agents are capable of enforcing change broadly in four areas: Structure, Physical Setting, Technology, and People.
Structural change is all about making changes in the organizational structure, authority and hierarchical framework, job redesign, and various other structural variables.
Change in technology implies a change in the techniques, methods, processes or best practices or the way of working itself.
Change in the physical setting involves a change in the layout and also the spatial arrangements. Change agents also facilitate a change in the attitudes of people, skills, behavior and also their perceptions.
A change agent may alter one or other elements of an organizational design. For example in a flatter organization, the organizational structure can be made less bureaucratic, various departmental roles which are interconnected can be combined, vertical layering can be removed and equally the span of control may be widened. Additional rules and regulations can be enforced for standardizing key areas of functioning.
The change agent may introduce decentralization, can establish project teams or a matrix design for working on specialized projects.
The change agents upon assessing the conditions of work; can be involved in job redesigning or work schedules, flexible work schedules, job enrichment, may modify the compensation structure and may introduce performance related bonuses or profit sharing.
With ever increasing competition and the growing need for being innovative for maintaining a leadership edge amongst the competitors, change agents resort to the introduction of technological changes. For example, if we analyze the manufacturing organizations, modernization and best practices in production are being introduced just to cut the cost of manufacturing.
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