Question

Exercise 6.1: Interviewing Change Recipients

Your task is to interview three employees, they can be in the same or different organizations. Ask them to think back to an organizational change that they experienced, and to answer the following questions:

1. Were they presented with an organizational vision for this change, and if so: What was the vision? What effect did this have on them? Were they involved in developing the vision? To what extent did the vision motivate them to engage in the change? How central was the vision to implementing the change?

2. If your interviewees were not given an organizational vision for this change, ask them: Would a vision have helped them to understand and become involved in the change? How important is vision to achieving organizational change?

When you have completed your interviews, consider the responses that you have documented. What general conclusions emerge regarding the relationship between vision and organizational change? What have you learned from this exercise/

Answer 1

The three employees interviewed were working a as a project manager in Alibaba and they were responsible for handling various supplier projects. The change that all 3 experienced was when a new tool was created to interact with the client, the earlier communication was through emails and zoom meetings but a new internal tool which had all the necessary integrations was introduced and that tool was supposed to be used by all the project managers.

1) Yes they were presented with the vision, the vision was that all communications would now be tracked and saved so that the customer cannot come back to us and say thus was not committed and this was out of scope. The effect was they had to use more formal language and also have to be cautious about what they are committing to the client and lastly it took some time for them to learn the tool as well. They were involved in developing the vision since they were interviewed about how they interact with the customer and what problem do they face. It motivated them since now a formal channel was created to interact with the customer and also their workload decreased since they had all the conversations recorded at in one place. The vision was central since it was an organisation wide problem since many customers have complained that they were committed something else but the final delivery did not include it so to have a track of it this system was necessary.