Effects Of Change Management On Organizational Performance In The Telecomunication Industry
[A CASE STUDY OF MTN NIGERIA]

2.2.4 Importance of Managing Change
Change management facilitates employees getting back to their work after change happens and makes it faster and more effective (O’Neill, 2012). Hiatt and Creasey (2012) stated that change management helps employees adapt and embrace change by reducing employees’ resistance to attain the objectives of business. They have also explained that change initiatives are always undertaken because there is a better chance or there is a problem to solve in the current state. Hence, organizations must manage change to ensure that it produces the expected results.
 Change management help individuals to embrace change and adapt new skills, behaviors, and values by change leaders, whom make individuals able to transit successfully from the current state to the future one (Fernandez and Rainey, 2006; Kunze et al., 2013). Walmsley,(2009) stated that if managers see change management practices in an organization as unnecessary, then no plans and no strategies will be prepared to embrace change. According to him this view of change management will cause the organization to lose its efficiency, productivity, and in many cases valuable members.
2.2.5 The Catalyst of Change process
Change is defined as changes in the content of a firm's strategy as defined by its scope, resource deployments, competitive advantages, and synergy (Hofer and Schendel, 1998). A simple form of strategic change is a way of changing the objectives and vision of the company in order to obtain greater success. There is no certain magic formula to do the job and of course it is not always leading to success. Many companies fail to implement the plan correctly and completely, whereas the others fail to convey this change among employees and organization. It doesn’t matter how great the company theory is or how useful the change may be for the organization, as long as management cannot make it be understood by its human resources (Hofer and Schendel, 1998). There are some issues that managers who are responsible for strategic change should keep in mind. First of all they have to consider the culture and behaviors of employees. It obvious that changing something that people used to it for a long time is not easy to change. Another point is that when talking about a strategic change there must be good consideration about context compatibility between the change and organization. The usual mistake in this case is to pull successful solutions from other situation to try in current one, which will not work. The last issue is to consider that change is about changing people. Organization will change by changing the attitude of managers and employees of the way them do their business (Hofer and Schendel, 1998).
There are different type of changes which can be applied to different organization with respect to the situation and problem that they are facing at the time. It’s also important to manage the speed of the strategic change, being late in implementing the strategic change may make the change less efficient as it could have been. The speed of strategic change can be continues over time or can be done all at once. Transformation consists of changing organization culture. To go deeper, its fundamental change within organization which cannot be managed with the existing way of organization performance (Beckhard, 2007). All organizations are currently undergoing some type of change. Many of these change programmes arise from organized management strategies such as culture change, business process engineering, empowerment and total quality. Other change initiatives are driven by the need for organizations to reposition themselves in the face of changing competitive conditions. Strategic change often involves radical transitions within an organisation and encompasses strategy, structure, systems, processes and culture (Beckhard, 2007). For strategic change to become a reality, it is necessary to change the way in which individuals within an organization behave. This requires more than restructuring and adoption of new systems.
There are three issues that managers leading strategic change need to consider. There is need for a shift in the underlying culture of the organization, attitudes and behaviours of the employees. Many strategic change initiatives stumble because they fail to deliver this shift by addressing the cultural and political reality of organizations (Buchanan, 2009).