Organizational changes are old as existence of organizations. And the existence of the organization is there as the existence of the humans. If we look back into the history when people start to organize in different ways to build towns, pyramids, in wars, there been need of some type of organization.
The first official record about organizational change was found into the Old Testament (ex. 18) and was related to the escape of the Moses with thousands Israelites as his followers from Egyptian pharaoh. Moses in that time have a problem with something that we call today as social networks. At that time, there were not Internet and Facebook and Twitter to communicate with many people. Each of their thousands followers has direct access to him. They cannot solve the problems of all followers. His father-in-low propose him to make reorganization and to carry out something that we now called hierarchical pyramidal structure. Than managers from higher levels will come to him only with problems that they cannot to solve.
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We can see that organizational changes are not something new.
What is scientific development of organizational change?
Briefly, I will obtain some forerunners of something that we call today organizational change:
- Scientific Management – Some first scientific exploration of organizational changes was made by Frederick Taylor in the late 1800s and early 1900s and his famous book Scientific Management. Taylor today present father of the field of industrial engineering and initiatives that today we call re-engineering and business process re-engineering have been evolved from Taylor and his work.
- Hawthorne Studies. Taylor’s work was based on the disciplines of economics and engineering. Hawthorne studies that were conducted from 1923 to 1933 were more related to psychology and sociology. For the first time in the organizational changes was included social factors as something that can impact of productivity of the companies.
- Organizational Development. We cannot talk about organizational changes without organizational development. Organizational development that comes from 1950s and 1960s as some type of organizational changes is in the group of planned changes, but changes focused on human factors in an organization.
- KAIZEN. We cannot talk about evolution of the organizational changes without including the Kaizen philosophy (1950s) that makes changes in perception of management and changes in the organizations. This philosophy comes from Japan and implements small changes in all aspects of company continually.
- TQM – Total Quality Management. TQM is a process of organizational change that has aim to improve quality in all organizational processes. For the first time when is talked about quality it is quality of all business processes. It is not quality only of the products or services.
- Managerial Grid. As one of the contributors into development of organizational change theory is managerial grid developed by Robert Blake and Jane Mouton in 1964. This model identifies five different leadership styles based on the concern for people and the concern for productions.
- Lean Management. Lean management comes from Toyota Motor Corp. between 1960s and 1970s and because of that is also known as Toyota Production System. The concept of lean management implements simple changes in the inventory system, in the business values, in the business costs and so on to receive overall business improvements.
- BPR – Business Process re-engineering. re-engineering is the concept of the organizational change that implements big radical change that will change overall look and feel of the businesses. The concept and method were developed from the Michael Hammer and James Champy in their Re-engineering the Corporation – A Manifesto for Business Revolution.
- Fractal Philosophy. Fractal Philosophy is the answer of the European companies to the non-European management philosophies. The concept is based on the theory of the fractal geometry and use words as a self similarity, self organizing, self optimizing and orientation to the objects.
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