Influence of Policy Framework and Technology on Change Management in Selected Telecommunication Companies in Tanzania

Introduction

Change is a necessary evil as the famous dictum rightly states. The inevitability of change can never be overstated especially in modern society, driven, and characterized by innovation and a need for improvement. The strategic and operational agendas that preoccupy the 21^st century organizations agenda is the concept of change. Today’s business environment comprises of new realities such as disruptive technology, fierce competition, unpredictable economy, globalization which require companies to develop abilities to adopt these changes in a bold manner to gain competitive advantages and hence acquire superior performances. Change is a transition with a variety of occurrences among them new ways of doing work, a new system installed, new job role, new product/services, mergers, acquisition or change in market location. Change management is the process of dealing effectively with the changes by an organization. It involves introducing the change and careful monitoring and controlling the changes (Hiatt & Creasey, 2012). According to Kang, (2015), change management is the method of constantly renovating an organization’s structure, direction, and capabilities to cater to the external and internal needs of customers. During this process, organizations that tend to skillfully steer change flourish while those who are unable struggle to exist in the market (Ogochi, 2018). To manage change in organizations successfully depend on behavoiural and systemic attributes of an organization.

Change management is an opportunity for stakeholders in the organization to participate in sharing ideas on how best to implement the needed changes. Change management reduces employee resistance and facilitate them to embrace changes and adopt new skills, behavior, and values to attain company’s objectives (Hiatt & Creasey, 2012; Kunze, Bohm & Bruch, 2013). Telecommunication industry is one of the industry experiencing a lot of changes from liberalization of regulation, privatization of national carriers to advancement in technology like wireless network and internet. These transformations have resulted into the restructuring of the industry from traditional nationalized carrier to information and communication era which include integrating and facilitating transmission of information to numerous distances (Grishunin & Suloeva, 2015). According to Aljohani, (2016) the change process is strongly motivated by strategic consideration such as the need for organizations to improve their business processes and incorporate them in the ways of working. The end result of these considerations includes a well-structured program of change management which is developed on the assumptions that change is managed with minimum interventions that are linearly manageable, objective and measurable in short period of time.

A review of existing literature shows that studies have been conducted to examine the factors that affect change management. Though there are numerous factors that affect change management in companies, most studies focused on leadership and culture. A study conducted by Rioba, (2018) on the factors affecting change management at Telkom, concentrated on structure, leadership and culture and found that there is positive correlation with change management process. Another study by Wambua, (2017) looked at communication, culture and employee preparedness to change in state corporations in Kenya and found that these variables affect change process in a great way and managers in the organization ought to ensure proper communication on change should be done at all level in order to reduce resistance to change by employees. Van der Voet, Kuipers, & Groeneveld, (2016), looked at the relationship between leadership and commitment to change in public sector context and found out that for a successful implementation of change to take place, transformation leadership behavior of direct supervisors is an important contribution. Many of the studies in change management have focused on behavioral factors leaving a gap for policy framework and technological factors which this study seeks to fill.