Action Plan for SwanCare Group - Case Study Example

Action Plan for SwanCare Group Name Institution Action Plan for SwanCare Group Introduction Established in the 1960s, SwanCare Group Foundation was initially Swan Cottage Homes. However, with stiff competition in the market, the organizational management decide to change the name as a way of enhancing its performance through branding some of the services offered. Five years after its establishment, the organization became one of the leading institutions offering accommodation services to the Western Australians. Through the years, SwanCare Group built on the foundation laid by Dr. Richard Cleaver whose main intention was to provide affordable accommodation services that people considered safe and secure. In addition, the founder wanted people to socialize and feel like they were part of the community (SwanCare Group, n.d). Currently, a voluntary Board of Directors administers the organization while the members are leaders recognized the Western Australia’s corporate sector. It has more than 300 support staff, dedicated to their roles, qualified, and experienced. The organization has a comprehensive Strategic Plan that guides its activities as it strives to provide the highest quality residential accommodation services for those within their care. Its mission is to offer comprehensive quality care, accommodation, and services to its clients while the vision is to augment the subsists of the community members. within its community. With more investors coming into the market, competition is becoming stiffer that the organization has to adjust some of its activities to meet the needs of the clients. In the modern market structure, organizational change is one of the most visible and dramatic methods of change. However, it is significant that organizational change can have serious impact on the employees, potential clients, and the whole community (Vogelsang, 2013). The major factor driving organization change is the interaction between the institution and environment. The current problems faced by the organization include inefficient performance by the employees, organizational culture that does not foster accountability, and inappropriate consultation while making decisions. As a result, the object of the plan is to address the concerns of the potential clients, improve the changes, ensure that they are in line with the needs of the potential clients, and ensure the construction of accommodative residential houses for the potential clients. Interventions Intervention refers to all planned programmatic activities, which aim to bring the desired changes within the organization. An intervention might lead either to development or to poor performance of the organization. In most cases, the changes are meant to ensure enhancement of organizational functions, efficiencies, and effectiveness. It is the employee's responsibility to bring the change within the organization while the consultants facilitate the change process. Any intervention, thus, involves close interaction between those charged with consultation roles and the organization. Intervention is any intended activity that aims to bring change within the organization and subsequent activities carried out within the institution. In most cases, both the external consultants and organizational management to effect the intervention. Some of the scholars define planned intervention as series of structured activities carried out within an organization of a sequence of tasks with aim of improving both organizational and individual development. Therefore, interventions are actual mechanisms developed by an organization to assist in achieving the goals. When effecting an intervention, it is crucial to note that it interrupts the normal organizational functioning processes, targets some level of the institution, involves an array of activities which if properly implemented within the organization, and it can take a space of short or long time. While considering organizational development interventions, it is significant to note that there are different types of interventions classified depending on the focus, purpose, and intensity. The focus of the intervention relates to the individual employees, interpersonal skills, intra and inter-group, systems and systems, internal and external environment. With the focus on the purpose of intervention, the organization intends to improve its processes, actions, and provide feedback mechanisms for the enacted plans. The depth of the intervention might be less intensive like setting up the organizational task forces and focusing much on dealing with the emotions of the employees. The major reason behind investing in intervention is to provide the feedback about the task, employees, and other organizational dynamic aspects. Moreover, it aims to improve awareness of the institutional changing norms and handle issues in a constructive manner, develop positive attitude, openness, and the level of interaction among the employees (Pasmore, Woodman, & Shani, 2010). The intervention also aims to educate the employees and enhance their skills that would bring constructive and desirable organizational changes and improvement in the end. Proper implementation of the interventions might assist the organization to generate a clear map of what it intends to accomplish. When considering effecting organizational change through interventions, it is important to ensure there are an effective change pace and sequence in action. Therefore, it is important to identify organizational component that requires intervention, the sequence of flow, appropriate pace, and ways of maintaining the momentum. Factors to Consider Before Implementing an Intervention To prevent implementation of an intervention that would not guarantee to increase organizational performance on the global scale, the management has to conduct both internal and external diagnosis to identify the component of the institution that requires change. With focus on the SwanCare Group, its aim is to provide quality houses that meet the standards and needs of its potential clients. Therefore, it is important to consider all institutional processes including the people. An intervention could either improve organizational performance or worsen the prevailing depending on whether the institution considered the underlying factors. More importantly, the institution has to specify the goals and objectives that it intends to achieve after implementing the intervention. Specifying the goal would help to prevent cases of ambiguity which makes the interventions vague and ineffective in the end (Rakowska, Valdes-Conca, & De Juana-Espinosa, 2015). Through focusing on the programmability of the intervention, the institutional management needs to consider the suitability of its staffs to understand and commit the change as required. If the institutional management programme the intervention to focus on specific institutional aspects, then the staffs are more likely to understand the required activities and accept it. Moreover, it is significant to state clearly the target level with consideration of factors that might be countering the implementation. For the effectiveness of the intervention, it has to receive internal support. Hence, the institutional management has to perceive the intervention as a legitimate activity. Without prioritizing the change, then the institutions is likely to find it difficult to implement the intervention. The top-down approach is the most suitable method of implementing the change since it reflects the seriousness and commitment of top management in effecting the desired change. From the outset of the intervention, it is significant to consider the availability of resources required to complete the initiative (Tidd, Bessant, & Pavitt, 2001). All the responses put in place by the institution to meet the rising demands of the potential clients and stakeholders are subject to four key constraints that in most cases contribute failure of interventions. These factors include time, costs, quality, and other resources. There has to be deadline for desired outcomes, costs refer to the financial expenditure of achieving these outcomes, and resources are the myriad things that organization can put in place in response of the problems it faces. These factors are always viewed as free from the institutional perspective. Nonetheless, they are subject to the opportunity cost because if the organization never devoted itself to effecting the change, then it could use funds for other processes. Proposed Type of Organizational Intervention There are different types of change including individual, group, and organization. The efforts of these changes entail two activities: action research and intervention. Action research relates to systematic method of collecting data on the organization, feeding them back for the organization planning, and evaluating the outcomes. The interventions are programmes compromising of specific but designed efforts of effecting the desired change. For years, organizations have been able to deploy different interventions to address some of the specific problems faced within an organization through change. Nonetheless, the aim of these interventions is common which is to improve the entire organizational performance (Hiriyappa, 2009). Generally, institutions willing to achieve a high degree of change needs to employ different types of intervention including those designed to effect the behaviours and attitudes of individuals and groups. Businesses attempting to effect smaller changes, at some point, will stop short of such objectives, applying the interventions that primarily target the operating policies, skills of employees, and structure of management. With the accommodation industry becoming more competitive, to achieve its desired goals, SwanCare Group will simultaneously integrate different interventions. Interpersonal or individual intervention programmes aim to enhance the skills of individual employees, their knowledge, and effectiveness while executing their responsibilities. However, the intervention uses group dynamics through gathering the employees’ together meetings that loosely structured. The method requires the group to determine the subject matter within the context of basic objectives as required by the facilitator (Buch & Rivers, 2001). While members in a group try to exert structure on their fellows, they acquire greater awareness on their feelings, motivation, and behavioural features. As a result, it makes it easy for the organization to identify the strength and weaknesses of the employees, which offers a breakthrough to improving personal performance. The institution, therefore, can create efficient training programmes that would help the employees identify their true wants and outline their complementary career objectives, and resolve conflicts. Within the institution, group interventions would assist both the teams and groups to become more effective. These interventions in most cases assume that effective groups communicate properly, facilitate a healthy balancing between both the personal and group requirements, and function through consensus as opposed to autocracy or the majority rule. The method allows for group diagnostics, which are meetings where the team members analyse their performance, ask questions on the areas that require improvement, and discuss potential solutions to the identified organizational problems (Catlin-Legutko & Klingler, 2012). The major advantage of using the intervention is that it allows the members to communicate issues that other are unaware of which spur problem solving and improve group dynamics. Using the Role Analysis Technique (RAT), SwanCare Group might assist its workers to acquire a better grasp on their responsibilities. The first step while using the intervention is to allow the workers define their perception of their roles and contribution to institutional performance in front of other co-workers. Then the group members will provide feedback on the ways in which employees depend on each other within the institution. Utilizing RAT intervention within the groups helps the employees reduce confusions on their responsibilities, which could result in conflict. However, effective intervention focuses on the people, organizational processes, strategy, and structure. Integration of these focusses contribute to a comprehensive intervention within the organization that will trigger structural, sociotechnical, and total quality management (TQM). Comprehensive interventions will help the institution directly create change throughout it processes rather than focusing on the changes that only spur the development of sub-organizational processes. The commonly used comprehensive intervention is the survey feedback that involves surveying the attitude of the workers at all the levels of the institution then disseminating the report the management. Consequently, the employees then use the findings to create solution to their perceived problems. The intervention will also focus on the structural change to alter organizational processes, departmentalization, management hierarchy, working policies, compensation, and other institutional cornerstone (Poole & Van 2004). To some extent, the factors influencing organizational performance might originate from within the institution, not as most institution that they are external factors. In such cases, changing management systems and processes will be crucial. Often, the changes implemented within an institution tend to emanate from the feedback from other interventions. An important benefit of intervention to the organization is that it offers the institution an opportunity to realize an immediate and very crucial impact in productivity and profitability. The sociotechnical system design intervention works in a similar manner as the structural change techniques. However, they typically put more emphasis on the reorganization of the work teams. The main objective is to create independent groups within the institution to supervise themselves. In addition, the groups will ensure the administration of all aspects of monitoring quality. The theoretical importance of using sociotechnical systems is that it increases the productivity and quality of the worker and groups since they have much control over the process that they participate (Cameron & Green, 2004). The TQM intervention utilizes the established quality methods and programmes within the institution to emphasize on the quality processes instead of achieving quality through inspection of products and services upon the completion of the processes. The role of internal politics, culture and leadership in implementing the changes in the organization Viewed as the most leadership challenge, organizational culture poses dilemma due to presently less agreement on its concept, meaning, observation, and measuring techniques. Issues on its relationship with theories from traditional industrial and organizational psychology sectors are also not clear. Most of the research conducted on culture implicit paradigms that not only bias the meanings of key concepts, but also the entire approach to the study. According to the Forbes, the elements of organization culture when fit together makes it becomes very difficult to address leadership changes. Most of the survey conducted view culture as a property of groups measured by use questionnaires hence a Likert-type profile (Prier, 2015). Unfortunately, this has made it very difficult to define organizational culture due to ambiguity. The tenacity of culture mainly derives from anxiety-reduction function, which comes because of common assumptions and perception patterns viewing things. Changing a culture is a difficult undertaking; hence, all of the tools for changing minds must be put in place while considering the order of deployment since it has a serious impact on the probability of success. It is important to begin with leadership tool and then management tools and finally power tools. It is important to understand all observed diverse artifacts like the ability of the organization to endure very high degrees of conflict without destroying or demotivating its employees since the organization structure might not be the cause of poor performance. Every organization manifests its cultural levels in various ways associated with observable artifacts, values, and the underlying assumptions. The artifact is simply the physical layout of the organization such as the dress code and manner of communication among the workers, but it brings with the decipher problem. Once the creation of an organizational culture, it brings with it various challenges. A case of the World Bank as outlined in the Forbes, which has achieved a lot of success, has failed especially in addressing issues affecting African countries. In contrary to this, some nations such as India and China are now independent economically in their own right as a result of implementation of economic policies that the World Bank has been education them for several years. Leadership is an important component of ensuring the success of the intervention. Where individual project leadership is much of a concern, it is one of the instances cited as one of the factors influencing the response of the implementation. Focused and committed leaders can make success even when the projects are weak due to their diligence, persistence, and perseverance during the implementation process. With leadership, it becomes easy for SwanCare Group management schedule and lead meetings, perform the responsibilities they have agreed on in an accountable manner, and make the project intervention as their priority of concern. The leaders often press ahead unless made to stop which highlights the significance of carefully selecting the leaders. Therefore, while selecting an organization leader, it should not be based on who has the time to spare, but rather who properly fits the job, with records of accomplishment, and ability to deliver the desired results (Clarke, 2011). Where there is concern for organizational leadership, it is easy to receive response implementation from the senior management. As a result, this will provide support and encouragement for the intervention besides addressing the high-level problems should they arise. Good senior management leadership also plays an important role in creating an organizational attitude where people can work as a team. An institution that has a strong blame culture often experiences a stifle innovation and creativity through making the staff wary of trying something new that will ensure improvement in performance. Culture creation may occur because of modeling by leader figures permitting the group members to identify with them through the internalization of their values and assumptions (Elise, 2008). However, this has led to the creation of shared assumptions because of joint learning. Leaders can continue attempting to embed their own assumptions, but instead, find that other parts of the organization have their own experiences that cannot be changed. An organization culture might not affect the success of any organization. In most cases, interventions put in place by institutions succumb to failures since they allow too much complacency, failing to create sufficient guideline, estimating the importance of vision, under communication, and embracing retrogressive institutional politics and culture. Organizational politics is the widespread effects on the attitude and behavior of the employees while culture is important in understanding the processes that might lead to the prosperity of organizational change. In every institution, there are laid down procedures that guide the manner in the employees carry out themselves while executing their roles, time of taking up the responsibilities, and distinct responsibilities. Institutional politics is an art of utilizing the art of influence, authority, and power in achieving the desired objectives. However, most people confuse power and politicking in an organization as they consider both of them as unsavory where the management wield power while serving the egocentric and individual pursuits. The established research work indicate that institutional politics have numerous effects on the attitude and behavior of the employees. These effects include evaluation of performance, allocation of resources, managerial decision-making, efficient, and effective commitment, job satisfaction, and institutional citizenship behavior. It is important to note that there are two types of institutional politics, destructive and constructive. Destructive politics puts an institution in stress; add extra doubt, and low commitment among the employees and management. As a result, the organization experiences poor performance. Moreover, destructive politics can cause a roadblock in the organizational development, which unnecessarily hinders the development towards the desired change. On the other hand, constructive politics is important in driving positive organizational change; build an effective support system, and outlines methods of overcoming the resistances. Institutionalizing the desired change Planned changes often fail to meet the desired outcomes due to rejection or resistance at different stages of project implementation. Since some of the interventions always to take hold after the implementation process, the management then returns to old methods, they ignore new structures and processes and fail to incorporate the modern technologies. While executing the changes, the management also needs to consider the sustainability of its efforts. The new working method and performance levels need to be sustainable. In addition, the interventions also require sufficient time to ensure that the change sticks within the organization until a point that it becomes seemingly integrated into the practice (Burnes, 2004). According to Waddell, Cummings, and Worley model for the institutionalizing change, institutional characteristics tend to influence the feature of the intervention in question, which in turn influence the process of institutionalization. As a result, the institution experiences the desired outcome of the whole process. To ensure that the effected change have long term and sustainable outcome, the process of institutionalization require much attention just as any other part of the organizational processes and frameworks. Besides, the needs of the clients and those of the stakeholders, therefore, the institution needs to monitor and evaluation continuously the implemented interventions to ensure that they match the changing needs. Most of the interventions often fail due to failure by the management to make the roles of every person clear. In addition, there are barriers, responsibilities, and shifts between departments that might affect the smooth implementation of the intervention. These factors could be obstacles to teamwork and cross-functional co-operation, which in turn affect the individual performance and that of the organization as whole. Communication is also an important aspect that the organization will have to improve. SwanCare Group has poor communication framework that might affect fast implementation of the implementations. Communication is important especially the criteria used in recognizing the achievement. The top management should also reduce the interference for those charged with the mandate of implementing the interventions (Brown & Scott, 2007). Therefore, a high level of dependence on the key people within the institution could put the changes at risk especially if these specialized people leave the institution. From this regard, the degrees of job flexibility and cover are crucial. However, there are factors indicating the level of institutionalization including knowledge, performance, normative consensus, and value consensus. With reference to knowledge, the employees should be able to justify their capacity to perform the behaviours and recognize the associated consequences. Properly implemented intervention should assist the institution to meet some of its desired goals. ACTION PLAN GOAL: To provide comprehensive quality care, accommodation, and services to our residents Commencing Date: Completion Date Objective Activities Implementing officer Completion date Status 1. To enrich the lives of everyone in our community Sensitizing the local communities Identifying the organizational challenges Implementing the appropriate intervention for the institution The HR Marketing officers The CEO 1. To provide comprehensive quality care, accommodation, and services to our residents Training the employees Aligning organizational activities with the needs of the clients Identifying the weaknesses and strengths of the employees The consultants External HR Team leaders of the employees’ groups References Brown, R., & Scott, M. (2007). Center for Problem-Oriented Policing | Tool Guides | Implementing Responses to Problems. Retrieved from http://www.popcenter.org/tools/implementing_responses/print/ Buch, K., & Rivers, D. (2001). TQM: the role of leadership and culture. Leadership & Organization Development Journal, 22(8), 365-371. Burnes, B. (2004). Managing change: A strategic approach to organisational dynamics. Harlow, England: Prentice Hall Financial Times. Cameron, E., & Green, M. (2004). Making sense of change management: A complete guide to the models, tools & techniques of organizational change. London: Kogan Page. Catlin-Legutko, C., & Klingler, S. (2012). Organizational Management. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press. Clarke, M. (2011). Organizational democracy, ethics and leadership: The mediating role of organizational politics. Leadership, 7(4), 415-433. Elise Wiliarty, S. (2008). Angela Merkel's Path to Power: The Role of Internal Party Dynamics and Leadership. German Politics, 17(1), 81-96. Hiriyappa, B. (2009). Organizational behavior. New Delhi: New Age International. Pasmore, W. A., Woodman, R. W., & Shani, A. B. (2010). Research in organizational change and development: Volume 18. Bingley, UK: Emerald. Poole, M. S., & Van V. (2004). Handbook of organizational change and innovation. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Prier, D. D. (2015). The Racial Politics of Leadership, Culture, and Community. Urban Education, 12(5), 142-147. Rakowska, A., Valdes-Conca, J., & De Juana-Espinosa, S. (2015). Affecting Factors of Public Employees’ Organizational Commitment. International Journal of Synergy and Research, 3(2), 5. SwanCare Group. (n.d.). About - SwanCare Group - Accommodation for older Western Australians, with communities in Perth and Australia (Formerly Swan Cottage Homes / Swan Village of Care). Retrieved from http://www.swancare.com.au/swancare-group/about/ Tidd, J., Bessant, J. R., & Pavitt, K. (2001). Managing innovation: Integrating technological, market and organizational change. Chichester [England: John Wiley. Vogelsang, J. (2013). Handbook for strategic HR: Best practices in organizational development from the OD network. New York: American Management Association. Read More