About this Assignment
As organizations grow, particularly in the global space, change is inevitable. As businesses take on a more global facing model, management must be ready to facilitate the changes that ensue. This means creating plans for introducing and managing change. Lewin’s 3-Stage Model of Change and Kotter’s 8-Step Change Model are widely used to help overcome barriers to change in organizations.
Drawing on what you’ve learned in this course, please choose one of the following prompts and write a 2,000 word (minimum) report to address it.
Prompt 1
You are in upper management for a mid-sized manufacturing company. Recent economic changes forced upper management to move much of the manufacturing to a foreign country. As a result, many of the state-side employees will be forced to work directly with foreign counterparts. There is great concern that the existing employees may not embrace the change, and you’ve been tasked with creating a plan to minimize the fallout.
Develop a plan that will facilitate as smooth of a transition as possible, optimizing employee buy-in, satisfaction, and productivity. Write a report that explains the details of your plan, and be sure to integrate concrete examples and supportive reasoning for how to implement this plan following each step of Lewin’s 3-Stage Model of Change.
Prompt 2
You are an executive-level manager for a large marketing firm. Up until recently, your marketing executives enjoyed a myriad of perks including travel to meet with clients, laptop computers, free gym memberships, and company cars. However, after your firm lost a high producing account, marketing executives will lose some of the important benefits to which they’ve grown accustomed. It is your job to get the executives to buy into the changes. These changes include the restricted use of personal vehicles, limited travel benefits, elimination of telecommuting and the return of smartphones and tablets. You know this will not be easy.
Integrating Kotter’s 8-Step Change Model, create a change management plan that will convince the soon-to-be disgruntled executives to buy into the change. Write up your plan as a report that you will give to the CEO for approval before you implement it. Within the report, explain and justify specific steps you will take and your methods of communication with the employees about the changes.
Sources
As part of your research and justification, you may refer to the course material for supporting evidence, but you must also use credible outside sources and cite them using APA formatting. Please include a mix of both primary and secondary sources, with at least one source from a scholarly peer-reviewed journal. If you use any Study.com lessons as sources, please also cite them in APA (including the lesson title and instructor’s name).
- Primary sources are first-hand accounts such as interviews, advertisements, speeches, company documents, statements, and press releases published by the company in question.
- Secondary sources come from peer-reviewed scholarly journals, such as Trends in Cognitive Sciences and Memory and Cognition. You may use JSTOR, Google Scholar, and PsycINFO to find articles from these journals. Secondary sources may also come from reputable websites with .gov, .edu, or .org in the domain. (Wikipedia is not a reputable source, though the sources listed in Wikipedia articles may be acceptable.)