Changes’ overview

Coming to the main part of the research it is also necessary to mention that, according to the data received, 58% of respondents has participated personally in the change management process while the rest 42% has not take active participation in changes:

Figure 6: Direct participation in changes

To provide more reliable data during the course of analysis it has been decided to limit the sample to the respondents who has directly participated in change process. Thus, during the following analysis only responses of these participants are taken into account.

Moving to the questions about the change their organizations have ever met the respondents have provided a wide range of changes (the list of the changes named is provided in appendix). Talking about the change characteristics it is necessary to highlight that the respondents have described the changes referring to all the targets distinguished. The change distribution by targets is shown in the chart below:

Figure 7: Distribution of changes’ targets

As it is seen from the chart the majority of the changes, 57%, has been identified as belonging to the improvement of business results by implementing significant changes or innovations, 22%, have been referred to the continuous improvement process, while 17% of changes has been attributed to transformation and just 4% has been targeted to crisis or extreme situation resolution. It is possible to mention that the distribution almost follows the logic of frequency of different change types. The only surprising thing is that improvement of business results is represented twice more often than continuous improvement although it seems that due to the character the later one should happen more often. In our opinion this could be explained by psychological issues, as people suppose that they should try to describe something more significant that small daily improvements.

To identify more precisely the change types several questions about change demand and change potential have been asked. Having combined the results, it is possible to notice that the characteristics provided about the change generally suit to the combinations of characteristics used to describe each type of changes.

However it’s necessary to mention that sometimes the combinations of characteristics provided differ from the combinations proposed by Gareis. Although this issue is not the target of our research and we are not going into deeper analysis, in general it could be seen from the graphs. Thus, comparing the graphs representing the change frequency, change scale, change targets and readiness for change it’s possible to notice that the proportions characterizing the same change type differ. Especially, the problems arise while identifying the change frequency.

Figure 8: Change distribution by frequency

Figure 9: Change distribution by scale

In our opinion, it could be explained, firstly, by the different perception of the terms used or difficulty to estimate the issue but also by the peculiarities of a particular company and general character of the model. Thus, for example, insufficient changes aimed to the improvement of business process could happen in company quite rare due to the stringent technological requirements or to passive character of doing business.

Having analyzed the results received it has been decided to define the change categories taking into account the issues mentioned. Thus, the organizational learning has been characterized by small scale of changes, quite high readiness to change (4-5) and target of continuous improvement but its frequency could vary significantly. In its turn, further development has been described as the medium scale change with medium (3-4) and sometimes high readiness to change that leads to significant improvements or innovations, which frequency however could vary from medium to low. Coming to the organizational transformation it is possible to mention that it seems to be the best defined type of change. While describing it such characteristics as rare frequency, big scale and moderate or low readiness (2-4) are named in the most of the cases. And, finally, talking about the radical new-positioning it is also could be seen that it is usually characterized as a rare event involving almost all organizational parameters, targeted to the resolution of crisis situation, to which company is not much ready (1-2). To conclude about the identification of change type we would like to mention that the characteristics discussed usually divide clearly the first- and second-order changes, while the differences between the change types inside these categories remain to be vague and difficult to distinguish.

Based on the assumptions mentioned the following distribution of change named by respondents by types have been identified: