Leadership Decision Making

Barriers to Change:

Bringing about organisational change has never been that easy for any business manager. In the context of given case scenario, ASDA's management needs to first identify the critical areas that may be affected directly as well as indirectly by introducing alteration to the exisiting system. These may be classified in the following manner:

Fear of Unknown:

These barriers arise at an individual level and may relate to the human nature of fearing a change. Such resistance may include acquired or developed habits, parochial self-interests, misunderstanding, economic implications as well as low tolerance of change. This is due to the fact that employees get comfortable with the existing systems so much that they fear that any type of new alterations may result in deprivation of programmed responses that assist in dealing wit life's complexities. Also, developing job insecurities is another rationale which gives rise to change resistance within individuals. For instance, recently, ASDA faced loss of paid breaks due to introduction of Flexible Contract which created an uproar among its workforce comprising 60% of employees who opted against this arrangement (Short-Changing Staff, 2019). This was mainly due to the fact that uncertainty arose among the staff, specifically women, which resulted in increasing resistance to change for ASDAs management to deal with.

Shifting Structures:

Such barriers arise due to structural inertia that may cause upheaval in the existing balance or stability maintained in an organisation. Changing how people perform the tasks assigned to them may cause problems and resulting in creating a resistant force across various organisational levels affected due to such shift. For instance, in 1991, ASDA suffered financial trouble which forced their board of directors to bring in external help from Archie Norman and Allan Leighton. These individuals challenged then existing chain of command by directly interacting with store-level employees rather than managers who were supposed to receive an advance notice before such visits (Campaigning for Change, 2019). As a result, subordinate power increased in such times and reduced the influential hierarchy on a temporary basis.

Force Field Analysis Model:

This concept was introduced by Kurt Lewin in 1940s. According to this framework, it is crucial for the management to weigh the driving as well as restraining forces which are related to the organisational changes. The term 'Force Field' includes interaction between two forces viz. Forces For Change and Forces Against Change. These have been depicted in the illustration below:

This model is usually utilised as a decision-making tool by organisations all around the world who are considering significant changes to be introduced in their businesses. In case of ASDA, the force field analysis framework can help in overcoming the various barriers to change such as Fear of the Unknown and Shifting Structures. For this purpose, the management of ASDA may take into account following considerations so as to examine as well as ascertain the forces which help in striking between the levelling out two forces efficiently:This has been explained

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