Introduction
Research Background
An organizational change can be described as a systematic approach to transitioning organizations, team members and individuals from the prevailing state to a desired future state (Lewis, 2011).
It is a process within an organization that aims at assisting stakeholders to accept changes in their organizations or individuals affiliated with the organizations. The need for organizational change has been necessitated by the increasing market pressures (Lewis, 2011).
In this regard, companies are often effecting changes so as to remain competitive in the market. Organizational changes can be done in numerous ways.
They may entail realigning organizational goals and objectives, changes in budgets, reducing or increasing the number of employees in a project or within a department (Lewis, 2011).
Organizational change management process requires some fundamental structures and tools to effectively control any form of organizational change (Lewis, 2011).
In this case, the main objective is to capitalize on the benefits and curtail consequences for employees; besides, care is taken to guarantee that the process does not cause disruptions.
Even though this is the case, organizational changes can have direct effects on all departments from junior to senior employees within an organization (Lewis, 2011).
Therefore, irrespective of the nature of change to be effected, the crucial aspect is an organization’s ability to win the buy-in of its employees in relation to the change (Lewis, 2011).
Change is an unavoidable fact of any corporate organization; it also generally permeates in the society, thereby affecting everyone and every corporate organization. Therefore, the operations and structures of corporate organizations must have the capability of responding to change.
The need to respond to change is brought about by changes in economic conditions, government involvement, limited resources and tight competitions among business entities (Lewis, 2011).
Even though organizational changes are never deliberately intended to negatively affect employees, many employees still find themselves disadvantaged.
Problem Statement
Employees have been the main victims of organizational changes (Patterson, 2012; Allcorn, 2005). When employees are not well prepared and involved in an organizational change process, they are likely to be negatively affected by the change (Russel & McGovern, 2012).
Besides, failing to secure employees’ buy-in can prove to be disastrous to an organization’s change process (Bogardus, 2009). In this regard, many organizations do not pay attention to how changes may affect employees on an individual basis.
This is one of the reasons many organizations do not realize successful change processes. It is often important for an organization to find appropriate ways to involve its employees during the planning and execution of changes.
However, many organizations fail to do this, the consequence of which is the inability to realize how the changes affect employees’ commitment, behaviors and attitudes. The following are the list of problems and related sub-problems:
The main problem is:
- How do changes in banks affect employees at individual levels?
The related sub-problems are:
- How do bank employees perceive organizational changes with respect to their job specification?
- How do bank employees cope with the effects of organizational changes?
- How are bank employees prepared for planned organizational changes?
- How do planned organizational changes impact staff turnover?
Research Objectives and the Scope of the Research
The research study has the following objectives:
- To explore how changes affect bank employees at personal levels.
- To evaluate employee’s perceptions of organizational changes in regards to their work specifications.
- To examine how bank employees cope with organizational changes.
- To investigate the way bank employees are prepared for organizational changes.
- To find out how organizational changes affect staff turnover.
With respect to scope, the study will focus on how organizational changes affect employees within an organization. Besides, the research will be confined to the banking industry whereby employees of different banks will be surveyed and interviewed.
Since there are numerous banks within the country, and owing to the limited time, the research will only consider surveying and interviewing employees from only a few selected banks. Besides, it is worth pointing out that the data will be gathered qualitatively and then coded for analysis.
The instruments of data collection will only be two: structured interviews and open-ended questionnaires. The study will only be done for the purposes of academics. In this case, there will be no need to conduct a large-scale research study.
Literature Review
There exist many research and literature materials on the effects of organizational changes on employees. Various scholars have examined the effects with respect to different aspects of employees’ working environments.
Indeed, a study by Biron, Karanika-Murray and Cooper (2012) acknowledge the fact that there is a growing interest in cascading change through the hierarchical levels in corporate organizations and finally to individual employees.
This implies that interventions at organizational levels often have different effects on different departments and individuals. Another study by Saksvik (2009) has stressed out the significance of an individual employee’s perception and participation in an organizational change process.
Saksvik (2009) argues that the success of an organizational change process greatly depends on the degree to which employees are involved and how they perceive organizational change processes. However, the study does not address how the changes impact individual employees.
This implies that the scope of the study did not capture how employees were individually impacted by changes in the organizations they worked for. This provides a gap that this study seeks to seal through a survey and interviews.
Hansson, Vingard, Arnetz and Anderzen (2008) conducted a controlled study to examine the impact of organizational change on workers’ job satisfaction, exhaustion from work and self-reported health conditions.
The study was divided into two groups: one group of individuals affected by organizational changes and another one as a reference group of individuals not affected by the changes.
The outcome of the study pointed out to the fact that there was the importance of taking into account the interest of individual employees’ plight during the planning process of organizational changes. However, the study only dealt with the consequences of change on workers in relation to only a few selected aspects.
It did not provide a holistic approach to the study of the effects, hence its limited scope. In this regard, this study will widen the scope and look at the effects of organizational changes on an employee in a holistic manner.
Many different researchers contend that an organizational change is typically activated by a relevant environmental change that, once acknowledged by a corporate organization, results in an unintentionally generated response (Lewis, 2011; Contento, 2010).
The implication of this is that changes within an organization are intended to transform crucial organizational variables that further have effects on the stakeholders of the organization and job-related behaviors, especially employees.
Other scholars also describe change as an empirical observation of differences in a state or form over a period of time within an organizational entity (Antoniou & Cooper, 2005; Singh, 2009).
According to their perception, the entity may be a service or product, work group or an individual’s job (Antoniou & Cooper, 2005; Singh, 2009).
This means that an organizational change can be perceived as a critical event, which can prospectively evoke stress reactions and other forms of negative consequences in workers.
Moreover, employees normally face unique sets of workplace stress factors emanating from a changing work environment, which may be stressful for employees.
However, it is important to note that workplace stresses are not only brought about by organizational changes. Even though this is partly true, the scholars failed to acknowledge other variant factors that result in stress among employees.
In this regard, Barling, Kelloway and Frone (2005) argue that sources of workplace stresses may include the position held, workload and time spend working.
In this respect, a further study is necessary to determine whether or not an organizational change results in stresses for employees and how employees cope with such a situation.
This proves that the argument by Antoniou and Cooper (2005) and Signh (2009) were biased; their studies did not take into consideration other factors that, apart from organizational changes, may result in workplace stresses.
Joseph and Chacko (2010) argue that corporate organizations exist in a dynamic and changing environment.
They further state that most of the corporate organizations undergo extensive changes as resources increasingly become scarce; the implication of this is that employees are required to do more with limited resources.
In this case, Joseph and Chacko (2010) reveal that any change will have definite effects on individual employees. The consequence of these effects may be negative in terms of economic and social life of each employee. These, in turn, influence the employees’ behaviors, beliefs and attitudes.
The bulk of research studies that have been conducted on organizational change only focused on an organizational perspective while ignoring an individual angle (Packard, 2013; Peacock, 2008).
Such research studies seem to either evaluate an organization’s strategic adaptation or environmental changes (Malm, 2008).
Consequently, researchers have clearly neglected the attitudes and behaviors of employees charged with the implementation of planned changes; it is noteworthy of the fact that these employees are very important to the success of an organization’s change process (Wittig, 2012; Jimmieson & White, 2011).
Hence, most scholars have created a reasonable understanding of how corporate organizations take care of their environment and how particular contextual variables actually impact the achievement of specific organizational changes (Alkhaffaf, 2011).
However, the scholars have done less with regards to how individual employees perceive changes taking place within a corporate organization.
Moreover, the scholars have also failed to examine how such perceptions are impacted or influenced by particular organizational changes and their ultimate response to the changes. Therefore, this research study seeks to add to the little that is known about the impact of organizational changes on individual employees.
Other studies show that employees’ opposition is the greatest obstacle to the implementation of organizational changes (Mittal, 2012; Pasmore, 2010). Workers create opposition to change since they have no other options but to acquire new talents that are relevant to the changes being prompted.
The research studies show that employees have never disagreed with the necessity for change; they only experience what is known as the fear of the unknown and the capability of adapting to the new changes.
Vividly, these studies succeeded in finding out the reasons employees resist organizational changes; however, they failed to precisely establish how the changes impacted the employees thereby making them resist the changes. This is also a significant gap that this research will seek through a logically designed study.
Dean (2008) argues that despite the fact that organizational changes affect employees, effective and efficient change management is able to streamline the processes of change and minimize the negative effects on employees.
He further posits that when an organizational change is appropriately managed, employees are able to understand the benefits of a suggested change and hence accept it. However, it is important to note that some changes may end up still having negative effects on employees even if they are to be appropriately managed.
For instance, it has been noted that employees can only be motivated to participate in a change process if he or she is sure of getting expected returns on personal input.
However, where a change process directly targets employees, especially in relation to salary reductions and layoffs, they are likely to be negatively affected, irrespective of whether the change process is well managed or not.
Therefore, the argument by the Dean (2008) that an appropriate management of a change process motivates employees to support the change is generalist in nature and does not reflect the reality.
The researcher should have noted that there are intervening or moderating factors that must come into play during a change process to determine whether an employee is willing to support the change or decline to do so.
Another study highlightes the fact that some organizational changes that fill the work environment with uncertainty result in low work morale among workers (Harrington, 2011).
Consequently, most of them become cautious when it comes to taking risks; in this case, job performance and productivity go down and the employees become emotionally withdrawn from work.
The study additionally reveals that when a corporate organization undergoes an organizational change, such as a merger or acquisition, downsizing and departmental restructuring, it is likely to make workers have the feelings of uncertainty, insecurity, stress and fretfulness.
It is important to note that this study will have a theoretical underpinning, which is drawn from the motivation theory (Foster, 2007). Some researchers have noted that motivation forces are mostly described as those forces that encourage and sustain human behavior over a given period of time (Ryan, 2012; Held, 2006).
In relation to this, the main objective of organizational change efforts is to make employees sustain certain behaviors that enhance and support the organizational changes over a desired period of time; generating commitment is a significant part of the organizational change process.
It is noted that a successful implementation of a change process and working with motivated employees are crucial to the sustenance of an organization’s competitiveness (Ryan, 2012; Held, 2006). Therefore, the most appropriate theory on which this study will be grounded is equity theory.
Equity Theory was proposed by Adams (Msoroka, 2012). The theory proposes that people view their world in the form of comparative inputs and outputs. In this case, they calculate what they invest in their job and the benefit they get out of it (Msoroka, 2012).
They then make a comparison between their input and beneficial outcomes, on the one hand, and those of their peers, on the other hand (Msoroka, 2012). After this, they develop a ratio of comparison. If their input/outcome ratios are identical to those of their peers, there is unlikely to be tension.
However, any noted difference may result in tensions that may negatively impact organizational change processes (Msoroka, 2012). This is thus a social exchange process in which employees expect benefits that are commensurate with their input during work (Msoroka, 2012).
The variables that entail the social exchange in the context of an organizational change include resistance to change, commitment to a process of change and justice (Msoroka, 2012).
Justice, in this case, is a measure of how an employee may perceive some outcomes he or she gets from the organization following his or her input during the change processes (Msoroka, 2012).
According to Adam’s theory of motivation, if an employee perceives that he or she has not been treated justly, then he or she is likely to have a negative attitude and behavior towards working in the organization (Msoroka, 2012).
Therefore, the Equity Theory can help in understanding how organizational changes affect employees at personal levels.
Theoretical Framework
This research study will be guided by a theoretical framework. There will be two main forms of variables: independent variables and dependent variables. In a research study, the independent variables are the influencing or cause variables that lead to specific resultant outcomes (Wood & Ross-Kerr, 2010).
Dependent variables can be described as the principle variables in a research study. They can be defined as the outcomes that a researcher wants to predict by manipulating or causing change in the independent variables (Babbie, 2011; Kothari, 2008).
Thus, a researcher’s main aim is to establish the interplay between the independent and the dependent variables. There are also other variables that play a significant role in a research process.
These are known as moderator variables. Moderator variables are those variables that have strong contingent effects on the relationship between the independent and the dependent variables (Sekaran & Bougie, 2010).
It is important to note that the independent variables will be considered to be the organizational changes that take place within the banks that will be studied.
The independent variables will be the effects resulting due to independent variables; the dependent variables will therefore, entail the effects the organizational changes have on the employees of the banks that will be studied.
It is also important to note that there will be intervening or moderator variables which will determine the type of effects organizational changes will have on employees. The following represents a diagram of a theoretical framework for the study:
The main hypotheses for study include:
- Organizational changes negatively affect the attitudes of employees when they are not involved in the change process.
- Poor planning and implementation of organizational changes reduce employees’ job performances.
- The type of leadership enforced during organizational change processes within an organization impacts the beliefs and behaviors of employees.
Proposed Research Methodology
Research Methodology
The study will utilize a qualitative method. A qualitative research is a method of inquiry that is used to gather information related to a deeper understanding of human behaviors. Besides, this method of research study allows personal ideas, thoughts and concepts to be integrated into research findings.
A qualitative research method provides very rich explanations of issues that the use of a quantitative research method cannot allow (Merriam, 2009; Creswell, 2012). Importantly, a qualitative research method yields information about people’s real experiences, feelings, opinions and knowledge (Flick, 2009).
Therefore, having considered the type of data required to achieve the objectives of this research study, a qualitative research method is considered to be the most appropriate.
Furthermore, the setting of the study will be in the form of a survey research and structured interviews. A survey research is usually utilized to evaluate beliefs, views and sentiments of individuals or subjects being studied.
The use of survey research enables a researcher to analyze individuals’ behaviors that cannot be analyzed through other settings, like experimental settings (Andres, 2012).
Besides, the study process will also take place in an interview setting. Interviews will be helpful to the researcher in terms of creating an affinity with the participants, hence permitting the collection of adequate information.
The survey process will involve identifying respondents in different banks. The questionnaires will then be taken to each bank for the respondents to complete.
This approach will be taken because it may be difficult to gather all respondents together in the study process due to their tight schedules at the banks and the possibility of some of them failing to turn up for the study.
With respect to the structured interviews, the study will also be conducted in each bank. The interviewees will be asked in advance to spare a portion of their time to participate in the interviews. Each of the interviewees will then be interviewed for not more than 10 minutes.
Data Collection Methods
During the process of data collection, a triangulated approach will be used. With respect to this, open ended questionnaires and structured interviews will be utilized as instruments of data collection.
It is worth noting that a triangulated method of data collection combines a range of data collection techniques that ensure sufficient information is gathered for a study (Samsonowa, 2011).
With triangulation, the levels of threats to internal validity are detected and dealt with promptly. This, therefore, results in a stronger research design and more reliable and valid research findings or outcomes (Nykiel, 2007).
A sample of respondents will be selected from 8 banks. In this case, a simple random sampling method will be used to recruit 5 respondents from each bank.
Thus, in total, there will be 40 respondents for this research study. It is important to note that there is a possibility of some respondents failing to turn up for the study. In this regard, they will still be replaced through a simple random sampling.
Simple random sampling is preferred as the most appropriate sampling technique due to a number of reasons. First, the use of a random sampling technique allows every item within a population to have an equal chance of being selected for inclusion in a research study (Antonisamy, 2010).
In cases where a population is homogenous, a simple random sampling can guarantee representativeness within a research study. This implies that there is a high possibility of having a population under study to be sufficiently represented in a research study (Fink, 2006).
In addition, a random sampling technique is one of the easiest approaches to selecting sample populations; it is time saving and a cheaper means in terms of cost.
During the sampling process, research ethics will be observed. No individual will be coerced to participate in the study. Instead, every participant will be allowed to pull out of the study at his or her own will. Moreover, no form of deception will be used to enlist the participation of respondents.
The triangulated instruments of data collection, as earlier mentioned, include structured interviews and open-ended questionnaires.Considering the context of this research study, structured interviews will be crucial to the study since they are usually more efficient than other forms of data collection (Hersen, 2011).
Furthermore, the use of structured interviews enables a researcher to administer similar questions in a similar order, thereby ensuring standard responses from respondents (Hersen, 2011).
The choice of open-ended questionnaires has also been informed by numerous factors. One of the reasons is that open-ended questionnaires allow respondents to answer questions by providing information according to their own perceptions (Kumar, 2005).
Besides, during the study process, respondents are often free to provide as much information as they are able because they are not limited as in the case when they are to answer closed questionnaires (Kumar, 2005).
Moreover, another advantage of using open-ended questionnaires is that they enable a researcher to collect accurate data.
This happens in two ways. First, it is unlikely that respondents will forget responses they have to provide if they are allowed to respond freely.
Second, open-ended questionnaires ensure that respondents read and understand the questions before giving their response, unlike in closed-questionnaires where a respondent may simply disregard questions and end up providing wrong responses (Kumar, 2005).
This happens when respondents are given very many questions with numerous options to choose from.
During the data collection process, the respondents will be assured of the fact that the information they will provide on the questionnaires will be kept confidential and that their identities will also be kept confidential.
Moreover, the opinion of every participant will be respected. Furthermore, the researcher will respect the time of the respondents, especially during interview sessions. This will be important in terms of gaining their trust and future cooperation.
The data analysis process will involve inspection, transformation and cleaning with the aim of highlighting important and useful information. After the foregoing process, the data will be coded.
Coding is termed as an explanatory technique that is used to consolidate the data in a methodical fashion and provide a way to present the clarification of the data into specific quantitative techniques. With respect to this, the data will be categorized into themes.
The themes of the data will then be coded and entered into a computer system where it will be analyzed through a data analysis program known as SPSS. The statistical techniques to be used include frequencies, chi-square, percentages and other central tendencies.
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