An Age-Old Challenge to Organisational Change Essay

An Age-Old Challenge to Organisational Change - Essay Example This paper illustrates that organisations normally structure their basic operations along with traditional paradigms, or patterns, in their field. These patterns are a guide for managing organisational behaviour that put emphasis on organisational goals and structure and embody a unique value system. For instance, law and accounting organisations have customarily applied patterns that stressed equality among groups and individual self-reliance. A number of patterns are quite recurring and permanent throughout an organisational domain that people think this pattern is the appropriate and most effective organisation approach. But organisations at times discard such patterns, deviating from traditional paradigms in their domain, which consequently brings about organisational change. The Force of Innovation Innovative activities diverge radically from existing activities. Innovations may alter the current technology, norms, routines, skills, and outcomes in an organisation. Innovations a re prone to generate major cognitive difficulties when they contain a new basic knowledge or new connections among basic concepts, indicating that novelty in relation to the knowledge of the core organisation may create the problem of acceptance or change. Organisations with well-built procedures and activities confront the challenge of integrating change in the midst of stability. A traditional procedure has slight uncertainty in implementation and a substantiated history of successes, whereas an innovation has extremely ambiguous future successes. Moreover, organisations have a tendency to stick to practices that brought good outcomes in the past and are arranged to take advantage of the activities they regard to be competencies or competitive advantage. Thus, the preference of many organisations is to carry on with their existing practices or routines. Innovations are uncommon, yet when they take place, the outcomes for the competitors and the adopter are normally crucial. Organi sations perform product and/or service innovations to advance into other businesses, experiment with new technologies, or carry out process innovations to gain higher profits or acquire leverages over competitors. Organisations exploit innovations as means to obtain resources, as witnessed most evidently in the launching of groundbreaking technologies that weaken the existing technological structure. Such technologies are usually not launched by the major companies but by novice competitors. These innovations heighten the research and development activities of current companies and new competitors, as they try to gain knowledge of and become proficient in the technology and for its repercussions for businesses. Only when organisations have opted for a particular way of exploiting new technologies, a governing pattern, does the exhaustive research and development efforts end. This theory of interrupted continuity in technological development has been broadened to encompass other form s of changes in capacities, like changes in organisational structure and market approach.