Organisational Transformation in Practice - Essay Example

My role in this acquisition and change process has provided immense learning experience in terms of organisational change process and people’s psychology. A patchwork of this experience combined with learning from the module will be elaborated in this discussion. Literature findings will be confined to organisational change and its psychological implications on employees. Attempt will be made to provide a few probable and implementable suggestions for situations that did not conform to the need, as identified in literature.

Background of the company: Armen Technologies (AT) is a multinational company that provides information technology enabled business services in four regions of the world including Europe, North Africa and South East Asia. Headquartered in Beijing, AT has more than 5000 employees. Its business volume and spread were enriched when AT acquired the IT Company VTL Solutions. This acquisition process resulted in overall growth of AT, but after much struggle. Context: At the outset, this acquisition process was absolutely strategic and involved many negotiations during long period.

From HR perspective, this acquisition seemed extremely lengthy and complex process. The acquisition process that began with various types of negotiations followed into aligning the acquired company’s businesses, clients, customers and employees with the acquiring company’s systems. One of the most significant parts of this acquisition was reinstating the confidence of both companies’ employees at all locations. This task required a strategically planned approach and to be executed by highly experienced personnel.

While the general transformation process during and after the acquisition itself was complex and multidimensional event, transformation with respect to processes and systems in the human resources perspective was equally challenging. On a broader note, the HR aspect involved activities such as integration and alignment and corporate communication along with assistance in implementation of change strategies. Corresponding literature findings: Mergers and acquisitions act as change agents in corporate restructuring (DePamphillis, 2011; p.4). Organisational changes that follow mergers and acquisitions are usually uneven and face numerous obstacles.

According to Marks and Mirvis (2010), the fervor of success after acquisition usually infuses equally faster in the acquired company but in a retrospective manner, usually in the form of patronizing attitudes of its employees. To add further, unilateral integration of organisational systems and policies leads to greater turbulence in the acquired company. Culture-fit is a core ingredient of organisational sustenance post acquisition (DiGeorgio, 2002). Studies related to organisational change and mergers and acquisitions provide vast and diverse views that are mostly practically implementable and have been successfully implemented in many situations.

For instance, various change implementation models that have been proposed include McKinsey’s 7-S framework, Kotter’s (1996) eight-step model, Lewin’s 3-phase model of change ADKAR model etc (Hiatt & Creasey, 2003; Cameron & Green, 2004). All these models provide comprehensive and systematic methods to implement change. Several other models are suggested to diagnose change, such as, Kurt Lewin’s force field analysis model (Cameron & Green, 2