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