Sense-giving Mechanisms Of Organizational Change Managers Based On Social Information Processing Theory

The Environment Enterprises are facing today is becoming more and more complex and dynamic,Organizational change is vital to the development of enterprises and has become an important research topic in strategic management.At present,China is in a critical period of transformation and upgrading,many enterprises are actively undergoing organizational change,while most of the enterprises failed to deal the risks and difficulties during the process.More and more attention is paid to the ability of change management.Organizational change relates not only to organization structure,Organizational culture,Organizational strategy,et al,but also relates to cognitive factors in the organization.Cognition has become one of the key factors that influence the success of organizational change.Sense-giving is an important means for managers to manage the cognition in the organization,through sense-giving,Managers can promote the change.Now,Research about sense-giving is lack and fragmented,there are lack of systematic research on how managers can conduct sense-giving program effectively.Social information processing theory views cognitive process as the information processing process of people,Social information processing theory explains the process of memory storage and extraction in each stage of cognitive process and explains the formation process of cognition.This paper attempts to observe and analysis sense-giving actions of managers during organizational change and explore the mechanism of sense-giving from the perspective of social information processing theory,the mechanism will guide managers to carry out sense-giving activities more systematically and effectively.Take the case of Y(China)CO.,Ltd for example,this paper analyses the sense-giving actions during the business process reengineering process and establish the sense-giving mechanism.This paper consists of five parts.The first is the introduction part,which points out the research question,significance,purpose,the innovative points and the content of this study.The second part is mainly to review the study of change cognition theory,sense-making&sense-giving,social information processing theory.The third part describes the research method,object,the method of data collection and analysis.The third part describes the BPO process of company Y.The fifth part is the main part of this paper,it makes a concrete analysis of the sense-giving actions of the managers and build the theoretical model.The sixth part is to do a comprehensive conclusion and points out the lack and future directions of the research.Based on the research,we obtain the main core of the conclusions as follows:Managers should conduct sense-giving activities during every periods of information processing process.First,during information input process,managers try to affect organizational member’s s cognition according to the control of the information they receive.Then,during the processing period,Managers take actions to lead the individual’s cognition to a specific direction,these actions can be vision guidance,reconstruction and political means.Finally,in order to make the individual and the organization’s cognition to reach a compatible state,managers will also promote the feedback and social interaction among different members.Conclusions of this paper enrich the studies of cognition management and sense-giving,and will guide managers to conduct sense-giving activities more effectively.