Overcoming Barriers to Organizational Change
The Sony Corporation is one of the most renowned brands in the world. Despite its stature, Sony has been struggling to maintain its position in recent years as its management has failed to keep up with technological advancements and emerging market trends. As a result, the firm is in need of comprehensive rebranding and restructuring to turn around its fortunes. Restructuring is not an easy process as it comes with certain barriers that need to be overcome to make it successful. Sony Corporation can explore different options to remove the barriers that go along with the restructuring process.
The Barriers to the Restructuring Process
Performing a baseline examination is a suitable process for enabling Sony to identify the barriers to restructuring. More often than not, barriers develop lead to an adverse effect in a firm in the production processes and normal functioning of an organization since it develops deficiencies in the recommended and present practices (Hayes, 2018). It would be suitable to highlight the main barriers to change along with understanding how to avoid them. Once Sony knows how to overcome barriers, it should be easy to develop and execute the restructuring process. The barriers that the corporation is most likely to encounter as well as how it can overcome them are listed below.
Lack of Staff Involvement
This is perhaps the biggest barrier to the restructuring process at Sony. Workers typically fear change. These stems form not involving workers in the restricting process whereby even the most loyal employee will likely resist this change (Cameron & Green, 2015). The greatest misstep that Sony can commit is not to involve its human capital in the restructuring process. Such inaction is likely to promote the fear of the unfamiliar grounds the corporation is headed to, lack of drive to embrace a novel culture, and eventually a total barrier to restructuring.
Sony’s effort to engage in restructuring can only be successful if its workers are involved in the process as much as possible. Including the staff would entail listening to their ideas, accounting for their output, and giving them assurances that the restructuring is for the good of the company, which includes all of them (Cameron & Green, 2015). Facilitating sufficient and relevant resources and information to drive them towards change will be key in this process since it would prepare them to adjust to the novel development within the organization.
Management Barrier
The problems that Sony is currently facing illustrate the company does not have an effective communication strategy. Indeed, the firm’s top leaders act on the assumption that once they announce the restructuring process, the workers will adapt hence be ready, to begin with this new development (Carnall, 2018). The CEO should stop announcing changes and come up with a strategy. Workers do need to know about the mere restructuring process. On the contrary, they need information about how the restructuring will affect them and how they will adjust to the transformation.
A Negative Culture
At times, the restructuring team lacks insight that the process will affect people. By only using analysis and logical frameworks to make decisions, the restructuring team will only create a rigid and hostile environment. Indeed, many times, a company can fail to make decisions based on feelings and intuitions (Cameron & Green, 2015). This means that Sony may disregard the feelings and perception of its employees about the restructuring barriers thus creating a barrier stemming from the harsh environment. The only way to overcome this obstacle is for the restructuring team to comprehend that the company must not disregard the feelings of workers. Sony needs to be active in mitigating resentment of the change process by upholding the taboos and traditions established in the company’s culture (Cameron & Green, 2015). Therefore, whereas critical thinking and examination of goals is a fundamental part of the restructuring process, Sony also has to consider the feelings of its employees to enable a completely effective process.
An Unfamiliar Current State
The restructuring will be difficult at Sony as the company lacks insight into its present state. Attempting to introduce and deploy change without performing an examination and comprehending the present framework of the company is a common habit in enterprises. By doing so, Sony will not realize that the failure to asses the present company’s blueprint will lead to the barrier to the restructuring it hopes to implement (Hayes, 2018). The only method to overcome the obstacle is to examine and comprehend the present framework of the firm before trying to suggest or introduce change, once Sony understands the framework clearly, it becomes simpler to develop and move to a future state.
The complexity of The Company
Sony has developed complex processes thus making the process of planning and deploying restructuring change a multifaceted effort. The complexities include multifaceted systems, processes, and products, which contribute to restructuring barriers since they are usually quite difficult for the workers to understand. It is important to overcome this obstacle, which can be done by developing a skillful and close approach to handle the complexity of the restricting process (Carnall, 2018). Sony can break this barrier by applying meticulous, quality, and highly effective change and project management approach. However, it is smart to avoid engaging in a restructuring process that is likely to be too complex for the organization. The company should not attempt to deploy a complex restructuring process if it feels the workers lack the maturity to handle complex change.
It is important that Sony Cooperation understands the barriers to the restructuring process to enable this change to be successful. As a large multinational corporation, rebranding and restructuring at Sony will not be easy. However, by overcoming the barriers, the process is likely to be successful.
References
Cameron, E., & Green, M. (2015). Making sense of change management: A complete guide to the models, tools, and techniques of organizational change. Kogan Page Publishers.
Carnall, C. (2018). Managing change. Routledge.
Hayes, J. (2018). The theory and practice of change management.