The dynamic business environment, increasing global competition, increased factor mobility especially that of human resources within and across national borders, rapid technological innovations and rapidly evolving product and services markets compel the organizations of today to be flexible in each and every respect of their structure and operations in strive for survival and growth. Under these conditions, there is only one constant for the organization, and that is change. The existing body of literature focuses mainly the reengineering and radical redesigning of processes in manufacturing organizations. This article seeks to examine and elaborate the management of structural and process change in service organizations where human psycho-social cognitive elements are important determinants of success of change interventions. With dominant role of human resources as the competitive weapon, service providers are increasingly facing problems in structural and process transitions for achieving and maintaining competitive advantage in the struggle of survival and growth. This article aims to present a model dealing with the management of change in service organizations using the change agents from strategic apex and techno staff by sequentially removing the physical and psychological barriers to change. The postulated relationships and model would serve to enhance the understanding of management theorists and practitioners in dealing with change and the management of change in dynamically evolving contemporary service organizations.
The recent growth of services sectors and services organizations in the developed and developing economies has brought them to the focus of management theorist and practitioners to judge the applicability of conventional organizational models in these new organizational settings. With dominant role of employees performance as a predictor of such firms’ performance, this paper seeks to develop a model of organizational change, emphasizing the role of strategic apex in making intervention in the psycho-social cognitive elements of soft structure of organizations. The organization change refers to any alteration in the processes and structure of the organization, which results in the evolution and development of the organization, keeping in view its continuously changing environment. At the same time, it is even more about changing how people do the business, how they think and act, it is about changing part(s) of schemata and worldviews of people (Spencer, 2001).