Organizational Change - Interactive curriculae of TU Ilmenau

None – reading material provided

• Understanding of and overview on change management, communication, and interventions in change processes as research fields and fields of practice
• Understanding and analysis of change situations and respective communication strategies and concepts based on a firm’s specific situation characterized by need for change, readiness for change, and willingness to change
• Identification and analysis of key actors in organizational change processes including their strategic goals, approaches, institutional structures and methods
• Understanding the role of a change agent and development of skills to act as a change agent in change processes

This course introduces students to the fundamentals of people related issues in planned organizational change processes. Course participants will look at research and practice in the field of change management. As a prerequisite to take part in the bloc course structured around the computer based simulation tool TOPSIM – Change Management participants will have to read a number of key research papers to familiarize themselves with the relevant body of knowledge. As the major part of the assessment (60 %) each participant has to submit a reflection paper on these research papers. The reflection papers and the content of the reading material will be discussed in the first part of the 3-day-course (full time); students will be asked to prepare short presentations.

During the 3-day-course the participants will take part in a computer based simulation training TOPSIM – People Management. This is a market leader strategic simulation tool that shows how change processes in firms can be designed and supported. The participants will be handed out a handbook describing the change situation and all people related issues prior to the simulation. Based on this information they are expected to identify key issues regarding communication and people management in the change process and to prepare a short group presentation (20 min) as part of the overall assessment (10 %).

The simulation scenario, People Management, is a pragmatic-based approach. It explores the options a newly-appointed manager (middle management) has to enable her newly-formed team to work in a new structure. It focusses less on regulations for concrete work processes and more on considering the individual needs, resentments and relationships of each member of the organization. How and when should changes be communicated? What are the potential barriers to implementing a change successfully? The head of department in the scenario is in a ‘sandwich role’ – she has to accept the change, set a good example as a manager, as well as inform, motivate and lead her staff to be committed to the new situation. She can choose from a selection of 30 different interventions. Each phase in the change process has a different objective, and depending on which intervention is implemented, with whom and in which order, the communication measure will have different effects which lead to the overall result.

The facilitators Stephan Kraft and Roy Käch will enhance the simulation by individual and group exercises based on real case experience.

All relevant course materials will be made available on the online learning platform moodle2 (moodle2.tu-ilmenau.de). Some initial readings provide an overview on the topic covered in this course:

• Todnem By, R. 2005: Organisational change management: A critical review - Journal of Change Management, Vol. 5(4): 369 –380
• Lewis, L.K. 2007: An Organizational Stakeholder Model of Change Implementation Communication. In: Communication Theory, Volume 17, Issue 2, pp 176–204