Effective change management in an organization is important in improving organizational image. Successful change management can only be achieved through understanding business environments and employment of suitable models of change management.
In many cases, change management processes have assumed ‘top-down’ models as compared to participatory ones for reasons such as time and resource consumption reductions. Organizational elements and their importance are thus put aside, ignoring their role in change management processes.
As a result, the final outcomes of change implementations become less valuable than intended. This raises significant queries on the effectiveness of this model in implementing change management over participative change management style.
Top-down model creates a conspicuous pyramidal structure within an organization and thus becomes socially influential. The importance of duties within an organization is clearly defined whereby decision making is done at the top while implementation is done at the bottom level and therefore constructing social realities through activities involved.
The model assumes that knowledge is only available at the top and thus, decision-making processes do not consider the importance of employees. Another assumption with this type of model is that learning is not a process done socially but believes that learning is concrete, such that there is no room for new learning experiences. These assumptions greatly influence the final outcomes of change processes.
The above weaknesses have continually raised doubt on the effectiveness of top-down model in implementing change management. As a result, participative change management has been considered priority option in effectively implementing concrete and successful changes than the former and thus has been desired for various reasons.
Since participatory model allows inclusive interactions during the whole process of change management, it provides a wider scope of collecting and executing information. To begin with, this model of change management is highly beneficial at every level of decision making within an organization.
Through giving a sense of ownership to company employees, this model prides employees in duty delivery and thus gives them internal motivation. This increases their output and thus greatly helps the company to achieve its goals in an easy way. Consequently, both the company and employees gain equal satisfaction and desired reputations.
Secondly, previous instances of change have indicated that there is a high preference for managers with participative change management approaches since they often gain receptive change. The implementation exercise becomes successful and effective change is gained in the process of change management process since employee input and additional contributions improve decision-making process.
Pro-activity presides over-reactivity when managers identify possible sources of problems and turns them to human resources within the organization for provision of solutions. Subsequent interactive participations continue to help employees acquire a wider scope of understanding of the organization through sharing of information.
Another great benefit is the acquisition of creativity and innovative skills. Employees, as well as managers, broaden their brainstorming skills acquired from problem identification and strategic solution formulation. These skills become invaluable in organizational growth and subsequent effective change management processes.
Due to employment of this kind of models in change management processes, organizational productivity is likely to increase, creating better revenues and future possibilities of positive and successful changes in the course of management process.
However, participatory management should heed caution in time, economic and human resource consumption, which might delay the process of implementing desired changes, which may cost an organization a lot of expenses in implementing change and involve multitude of employees in simple tasks regarding change.