Reference no: EM132927756

Case Study

A Norwegian company named Extrusion is seeking to flatten its organizational structure and in the process increase employee participation. The CEO of the company was very enthusiastic about this idea and enlisted the help of a management professor to document the progress and changes expected to occur.

After much initial enthusiasm about the change towards greater employee participation, there was frustration over the lack of change in the first year after the implementation was supposed to have occurred. One comment was, "They say they delegate, but they make the decisions themselves." There was also considerable confusion over what should be happening in the organization. For example, the setting of goals was still viewed as a "top-down" process, even though this was one of the fundamental changes that were supposed to take place.

The management professor described the second year of this change effort as a time of "relaxed expectations." Instead of the frustration expressed earlier, there was now some cautious optimism about participative management. However, there were a number of perceived barriers to actually carrying out this change:

1. Feeling "stuck," i.e., so busy with daily tasks and pressures to find new ways of doing things

2. Perceived lack of information, i.e., employees were asked to make decisions about which they had no (or incomplete) information

3. Perceived lack of competence, i.e., did employees have the needed skills to function in this new environment?

4. Lack of clarity about their new roles, i.e., how could groups of employees successfully self-manage?

5. Perceived lack of connection to the business strategy, i.e., how does participative management link to the organizational strategy?

Source: Adapted from: Human Resource Development (Werner and Desimone, 2009).

For this project, your role will be to serve as the head of the change agent team to help the new CEO and other members of the management team effectively navigate this organization-wide change process. As a change agent, it is your job to "assist the change manager in designing and implementing change strategy". In order to successfully navigate this change, you will advise management of the potential issues needing to be addressed prior to and during the implementation of the interventions.

Questions:

1. What issues would you raise before the organization switched to a flatter, more participative organizational structure?

2. What issues or problems might this organization face as it seeks to make such a change? What initiatives can it utilize to try to minimize these problems? Discuss.