CHRISTINA GOLD LEADING CHANGE AT WESTERN UNION - Research Paper Example

Western Union implemented an organizational change that was targeted to raise the participation of all its employees as well as increase its productivity by enhancing adaptability to the environment. Kotter and Cohen suggest an eight-step model of change that can explain how an organization can change in response to different situations in the market so that it can achieve the intended goal. Christiana Gold, the Chief Executive Officer of Western Union implemented an organizational structure change in the company so that it could enhance the productivity of the company in the market.

Through her effort, Gold wanted to ensure that the company can achieve high quality performance in the midst of the different things that happened in the market. While Gold’s plan of implementation of change could be related to Kotter and Cohen’s 8-step model, the plan could have had some differences that could be a different approach that can improve the success of implementation of the change. In the first step where Gold wanted to implement change, she identified the things that needed a change and helped the employees of the company to see the need of the organizational change. . As in Kotter and Cohen’s 8-step model step three (Daft & Lane, 2008), Gold created a vision of what Western Union would be if the changes in the organizational structure were implemented in the company.

She had a vision of the company having a global outlook and she focused on the ways through which different people could enhance the change of mindsets of all employees from a small company kind of company to one which would have a world focus. Through different people with whom she interacted, she communicated the vision, and this received the approval of some leaders at the regional level of organization accepting the new structure and showing positivity. This was regardless of reluctance to change that was witnessed in some leaders in America who could not see the essence of the new structure of organization and perceived it as a threat to their positions (Rowe & Guerrero, 2011).

The resistance to change that the different people faced in the implementation of the organizational structure change would have been easy to address if Gold had encouraged a broad-based action in which the employees and the leaders in different regions would be able to influence the employees (Daft & Lane, 2008). In this respect, the leaders would make it easy to communicate the changes that she wanted the employees to implement, and this would take a shorter time to achieve goals, as opposed to the style she used when implementing change in America, where regional leaders were reluctant to change.

In order to achieve this plan of the company to implement change in the organizational structure, Gold advocated for establishment of offices and leaders in the offices that could steer the new plan of the company.