The purpose of this chapter is to examine the relationships between organizational communication, organizational cultural, and organizational change. In other words, this chapter aims to examine the current issues of organizational behavior in relation to the concept of change management. The methodology that is used in this chapter is literature review. The authors have collected data with the use of the most known scientific and academic databases, such as Google Scholar, Elsevier Scopus, and Science Direct. Their research included a combination of the keywords “change management,” “organizational culture,” and “communication.” Overall, it was found that organizational change has a strong and significant connection with organizational culture and organizational communication. Managers have to take into serious consideration that when they want to implement an organizational change, they have to prepare all the employees for the benefits of the upcoming change.
TopIntroduction
Change management has attracted the interest of both academics and practitioners over the past 20 years (Rossidis et al., 2020; Rossidis et al., 2021a; 2021b). The continuous external crises (financial – economical, health crisis, such as COVID-19 pandemic, and environmental crisis), as well as the continuous growing, antagonistic and competitive business environment, have led organizations’ managers to include change management as a key factor for the successful leadership of an organization (Belias and Trihas 2022c, Belias et al. 2022).
According to Moran and Brightman (2001), change management is “the process of continually renewing an organization’s direction, structure, and capabilities to serve the ever changing needs of external and internal customers”. Due to the fact that the world changes very fast, it is very crucial for the survival of an organization to be able to quickly adjust and adapt to the several changes that occur on its environment (Belias et al., 2023c).
Organizational change is a very complicated situation as number of variables change, including the environment can rapidly and frequently change; also, resistance to change could create confluence of the changing process. These situations could stimulate difficulties in prediction of the changes as well they could make control impossible (Hussain et al., 2016).
Hence, academics have proposed several models which were used to describe the causes of organizational change as well as to explore how an organization may function during the change process.
One of the most well-known organizational change model is established by Kurt Lewin’s. Lewin’s model consists of three fundamental phases which have to be taken for implementation of change. These three phases are the following: unfreezing, changing and refreezing. All the employees should be involved and guided by their leaders regarding the change process.
Over the past 20 years, several research (Ahmed 1998; Pool, 2000; Rashid et al., 2003) have pointed out the influence of organizational culture on organizational change. More specifically, the combination of innovation and positive cultural characteristics can lead to the successful implementation of an organizational change (Ahmed, 1998). Pool (2000) suggested that organizational culture could help an organization to overcome ever-changing problems regarding the ability of an organization (resources, personnel, and policies) to adapt to the external environment. Therefore, it can be noticed that specific types of culture may facilitate the changing process while other types of culture might not. In other words, different types of organizational culture have different levels of acceptance on attitudes towards organizational change (Rashid et al., 2003).
More thoroughly, according to Rashid et al.’s (2003) research mercenary culture has strong positive attitude toward change, as this type of culture will make sure that employees would work hard and effectively in order to hit the goals that were set. Mercenary culture would be mostly adopted in a rapid changing business environment which requires immediate action. Similarly, network cultural groups had positive attitudes toward change. The key factor on network cultural groups is the fact that employees feel like that their between “friends” in the organization. This feeling of “friendship” would facilitate the need to change the attitude of organization’s members to adopt changes. This type of culture can be adopted in cases when time and patience are needed to prepare the employees to accept changes.
Another key factor to the successful implementation of an organizational change is the communication (Ntalakos et al., 2023b, 2023c). The importance of communication during the changing process has been described by several academics via the following terms: spreading a vision, minimizing uncertainty, growing employees’ commitment, and overcoming barriers to change.