The Overcome Of Resitance In Organizational Change-A Case Study Of Deployment Of The New Procurement System In The United Nations Office At Geneva

With the fast development of technology and the increased complexity of the society, the management of change is a crucial topic to all the organizations, especially international organizations. However, to implement a change is always full of resistance with more than half of the cases were proved to be a failure, especially in a large-scale organization since the status quo is reasonably comfortable to most participants.The recent change management theories focus more on the establishment and the description of the theory itself. Some of them are lack of the real practice in enterprises and organisations to check whether those theories could really resolve the problems encountered in real life.In this paper, the author talks about how change is managed in an international organization based on the studies of the deployment of an e-procurement tool by the experience as an intern working in the United Nations Office at Geneva during which the author has witnessed a great changing point in the Procurement and Contract Unit. The author was enrolled in the project management team and was mainly focused on the implementation of this new procurement tool within the whole Unit. In this process, the author has put theories into practice and has well developed the key elements of the resistance in both the management level and the employee level during this change. This case may be an inspiration for managers in public or private sectors to foreseen the key points and strategies so that they could better implement a change.In the first chapter, the author introduces the research methods and the literature review. In Chapter 2, the author mainly talks about the background and the necessity of implementing a new procurement system in this case. In Chapter 3, the author analyses the resistance and the strategies in individual level during this case study. Two groups of participants, the management group and the employee group, are well discussed. The top management and the implementation team need to create the specific strategies to lead the whole change while the attitude of the employees towards this change is also of vital importance. The resistant factors within the management group exist mainly in the top management commitment and the middle management's deployment in practice. To be more specific, there are four key factors of challenges. Firstly, the top management doesn't fully support the change plan. Secondly, although the top management has a great vision, the real process and concrete steps aren't implemented within the employees. Thirdly, the implementation team is formed, but they don't have a thorough preparation so that they can't well lead the change. Lastly, the implementation team is lack of the leading power and the ability to coordinate different aspects during the whole change process. The author explains all those key factors that are the main obstacles to conquer in the management level. In the employee group, there are five types of resistant factors. Firstly, the employees don't get fully informed and they become anxious and passive without knowing the benefits of the change. Secondly, they totally ignore the vision after the change that is too distant from the reality. Thirdly, the adaptability and learning ability are different in the participants and some employees remain too resistant to be involved in the change. Fourthly, the problems occurred during the change lead to dissatisfaction. Lastly, the employees may believe the change is already finished after a short term of implementation so that they hold a careless attitude that may cause the failure of the change. The author explains how the managers could deal with all those challenges and could turn them into the motivation to better control a change process. In Chapter 4, the author analysed the special challenges in international organizations during a change. The various cultural backgrounds of the employees and different language preferences might become an obstacle, while the fixed salary structure makes it harder to reward the pioneers. In Chapter 5, after the summary of the whole paper, the author raises the importance to build a learning organization and some advices for international organizations in the employment standard.This paper has analysed the resistant factors in change management elements and summarised the strategies with a real practice. The author has a good command of the psychological change of the participants since the author was very much involved in the whole process. However, this paper is just an exploration of different ways in change management research that may have its own weakness. The models and the ideas still need more specific research in the future.