What are the Important Goals of a Planned Organisational Change?

Organizational change has a number of goals both explicit and implicit.

According to Edger Williams, goals of organizational change are as follows:

(i) To improve the means for satisfying someone’s economic wants;

(ii) To increase profitability;

(iii) To promote human work for human beings; and

(iv) To contribute to individual satisfaction and social well-being.

These goals have been originally identified with reference to business organizations. When these are translated to be meaningful to educational systems, the first two goals would mean:

(i) To improve the means for satisfying students’ educational needs; and

(ii) To improve institutional results and academic performance.

The third and fourth goals would remain the same.

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Greiner and Barnes identify the obvious common goals of planned change as follows:

(a) Higher performance;

(b) Acceptance of new methods and techniques;

(c) Greater innovation;

(d) Increased motivation;

(e) Reduced conflicts and increased co-operation; and

(f) Reduced staff and student turn-over.

A careful analysis of these goals imply that educational institutions bring about planned change with two broad aims:

(i) As an institution is unable to control its environment completely, it frequently induces internal organizational changes with a view to coping more effectively and adapting to new challenges stemming from outside in the form of new government policies, societal demands, technological changes, economic compulsions and realities, political ideologies and enhanced competition.

(ii) Educational institutions do not function through machines but through human beings. Thus, in order to improve an institution’s level of adaptation, it is essential that teachers behave differently in relation to their job and each other. Accordingly, any organizational change aims to bring about behavioural changes in teachers.