FMC Green River case study Organizational Behavior - Essay Example

In that case organizational change must be planned, monitored and controlled throughout its lifecycle, with completion occurring on full implementation and evaluation. Organizational change decisions are often complex, multi-faceted, and involve many different stakeholders with different priorities or objectives. Most people, when confronted with such a problem will attempt to use intuitive approaches to simplify complexity until the problem seems more manageable. In the process, important information may be lost, opposing points of view may be discarded, elements of uncertainty may be ignored -- in short, there are many reasons to expect that, on their own, individuals (either lay or expert) will often experience difficulty making informed, thoughtful choices about complex issues involving uncertainties and value tradeoffs.

This fact, and the tendency of change issues to involve shared resources and broad constituencies, means that group decision processes are called for. These may have some advantages over individual processes: more perspectives may be put forward for consideration, the chances of having natural systematic thinkers involved is higher, and groups may be able to rely upon the more deliberative, well-informed members. However, groups are also susceptible to the tendency to establish entrenched positions (defeating compromise initiatives) or to prematurely adopt a common perspective that excludes contrary information - a tendency termed "group think.

" (McDaniel's etal., 1999). For change management projects, decision makers may currently receive four types of technical input: modeling/monitoring, risk analysis, cost or cost benefit analysis, and stakeholders' preferences. However, current decision processes in Green River typically offer little guidance on how to integrate or judge the relative importance of information from each source. Also, information comes in different forms. While modeling and monitoring results are usually presented as quantitative estimates, risk assessment and cost-benefit analyses incorporate a higher degree of qualitative judgment by the project team.

Structured information about stakeholder preferences must be presented to the decision-maker, and should be handled in a perfect manner that minimizes the difficulty of defending the decision process as reliable and fair. If the structured approaches are employed, they may be perceived as lacking the flexibility to adapt to localized concerns or faithfully represent minority viewpoints. As a result,