Change Management at International Centre for Tropical Agriculture, Nairobi, Kenya
Abstract
The dynamics in the market have created
challenges for both public and private
organizations to reorganize the operations
of the firm to meet the challenges and
opportunities of the day. Change is inherent
in contemporary organizations and its
management is not only critical to organiza
tional success and survival but is also at the
crux of the field of organization developmen
t. Change management practices include a
variety of organizational inte
rventions that, when executed
properly and in consistency
with internal and external organizational even
ts, facilitate the enact
ment of organizational
change processes. The objective of the study
is to evaluate the Ch
ange Management at
the International Centre for Tropical Agricu
lture (CIAT), Nairobi, Kenya. The research
adopted a case study where five interviewees were selected and interviewed on the
change management process in the orga
nization. The findings were that the top
management and the respective heads of diffe
rent departments were the lead persons
tasked with the spearheading the change
process in the organization. Effective
communication process between
various departments and staff involved was found to be
an important factor in the successful impl
ementation of the change
process. Training
plays an important role in
the change process by empowering employee and early
involvement of all the staff is
vital in creating ownership
of the change process.
Challenges that the organization face in it
s change management process includes
resistance to change by superv
isors which trickles down to the staff they supervise. The
external factors that affect change proce
ss in the organization
include reduced funding
resulting from the influence from compe
ting NGO’s who sometimes negatively influence
staff in a bid to promote resistance and this
result in scaling of
funding from the donors.
A lack of adequate resources that compete fo
r the core activities of
the organization as
well the change process is an
inhibiting factor to change ma
nagement. Future research is
recommended to use mixed methods research in order to validate the results of this
research, and apply a longit
udinal study to bette
r capture the rela
tionships between
change process and organizational performa
nce. Organizations should focus on the
identified gaps on implementing change ma
nagement process,
especially in the
applicability of change theories
and be more synthetical rather
than analytical. Since, the
data in the research was collected from middl
e level managers of the organizations on the
basis of their subjective eval
uations; objective change indi
cators in the findings might
have elements of subjectivity
considering that they are involved in implementation of the
change process
Publisher
University of Nairobi