Managerial Practices: Hybridization

By Khalid Al-Jufairi
Ph.D. Candidate

Friday, 17 March 2017

Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) are no strangers to the dynamics of change management, and to the development of efficient corporate hierarchy and structure. But there is still much they can learn from the experiences of commercial organizations.

For-profit business organizations recognize there is no single successful management process, as all actions and behaviors have to be adjusted to reflect the individual workplace environment. NGOs would be well served to follow this approach, tailoring strategy development to the attitudes and norms of their internal workplace setting/culture and management practices.

Developed by Baruch Shimoni and Harriet Bergmann, this nexus between strategy and office culture is described as hybridization, explaining the flow of cultures into one another and the formation of a new mixture of cultures: developing a new management form.

In brief, the best practices of organizational change management are:

1.  Define the organizational governance: explicitly describe and detail the framework for decision rights, and streamline the approval process. Roles and responsibility must be established across all level of the organization

2.  Address workforce concerns/employees’ grievances: Systematically aligning employee personal development objectives with organizational strategy formulation, process orientation and human resources polices

3.  Assign ownership: each project to be undertaken must have a sound business case with implementation strategies. The project owner is then accountable for the decision made

4.  Review and assess on a regular basis: constantly re-examine established targets, key performance indicators against market conditions and developments. Mid-year review cycles are an excellent opportunity to refocus objective and re-adjust targets

Importantly, devising a structure of continuous feedback and information exchange is critical to the success or failure of change management with all pertinent stakeholders. We change when market conditions change, yet we should cope with change and its flux.  

Image by Jack Moreh via Freerange