Question

Compare and contrast the concepts of environmental and organizational pressure. How do these pressures affect an organization?

Answer 1

Environmental and organisational factors pressurizes business firms, and induce changes. Environmental factors are external to the firm organisational factors are internal. External factors involves governmental policies and regulations, competition from rivals, technological changes, customers tastes and preferences, and other forces which give no control to avoid but can be minimised. Internal forces involves employees, management, organisation structure, firm's policies, strategies, administrative process, and many other, which can be controlled. These forces pressurizes a firm to move from present state to a future state, it depends on the capacity of the organisation how well it moves to a new state by implementing change management without incurring major problems and rising threat to its existence.

External factors viz, government policy change, influence the business to change its products offering, or to to stop certain products or services, changes tax rates, bring strict policies which puts burden and pressure on the company and induce unwelcome situation to be considered. As technology is fast paced, a business organisation needs to constantly seek how well it can adapt new technology and what drastic change it will bring on the management and operations. Customers tastes and preferences can change anytime, leaving many businesses in losses if they are providing what they need.

Similarly, internal factors affect the firm to change is activities, structure and policies for the betterment and to stay competitive in the market. Employees behaviour, their performance affects overall organization success, impact profitability, hence they are provided with training, they are also made ready to embrace change brought by external factors, which often results in resistance, chaos if not properly communicated. Management improvement also facilitates major changes, and administration also consistently improved so that every functions are conducted as desired and every element is managed with efficiency. Firms changes its strategies as to compete with the rivals, or to sustain in the industry this may sometimes leads to mergers acquisitions, going international, vertical and horizontal integration which brings drastic change in overall organization and almost every areas, say from vision, mission, objectives, to planning, managing, organising, investment etc. In such change employees are the majorly impacted and are at anxiety, inturn affecting the organization with poor performance, resistance, strikes and creating conflicts. A proper change management planning and pre assessment will help to meet these challenges.